


in the five am light

by espressohno



Category: Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Domestic, Friends to Lovers, Humor, M/M, Mild Hurt/Comfort, Roommates, Sex, and they were ROOMMATES, oh my god they were roommates
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-19
Updated: 2019-06-19
Packaged: 2020-05-14 17:42:31
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 23,422
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19278241
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/espressohno/pseuds/espressohno
Summary: Leonard McCoy is a washed up writer who wrote one bestseller years ago and has yet to finish his second book. In the midst of him wallowing in self pity and self hatred, his daughter recommends he rent out the spare room in his house so he can cut his hours as a professor and focus on writing. Enter Jim Kirk, a walking contradiction who quickly becomes a thorn in Leonard's side, and then, eventually, something more.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> hey it's me again, back with another off-beat mckirk au. most of you are probably going to be thinking, "where the hell did this idea come from?", but some of you will be thinking, "why does this feel kinda familiar?"  
> that's because this started as a total ripoff of that movie wonder boys from 2000. you know, the one with tobey maguire in it. if any of you have actually seen that please leave a comment and tell me so i know i'm not a complete weirdo
> 
> anyway, please enjoy

The sound of the front door unlocking sent Leonard flying out of his chair and towards his bedroom to find pants. His daughter was here. She was always here, almost every Sunday, at the same time during the mid-morning, and yet somehow Leonard always got distracted at his keyboard and was never ready. It was one of those things he did which never failed to fill him with irrational self hatred. 

The door opened and shut again and Leonard still hadn’t found pants in his mess of a closet. He grabbed his flannel bathrobe off of the floor and rushed into the bathroom to make sure he didn’t look too hungover or too unshaven. He wasn’t so bad, this time. Joanna had definitely seen worse in her 20 years of being his daughter.

“Dad?” She called out from the foyer. He pounded down the stairs and was nearly out of breath by the time he made it to Joanna. 

“Hey, Dad.” She smiled. Two years ago when she had first moved to Boston and they started this tradition of Sunday brunch she would have said something like  _ Dad, you’re not even dressed _ , or  _ did you forget I was coming? _ but by now she knew what to expect. 

Joanna looked ready for brunch, at least. She always did. She looked young and fresh and well-rested, in a light blue raincoat that never failed to make her stand out in the street among all of the other citizens of Boston who wore black and scowled at the ground everywhere they went, Leonard being one of them. Leonard used to be afraid of how much she looked like her mother; they had the same dark blonde hair, the same round face, their noses pointed the same way and their eyebrows followed the same soft curve. When they met for the first time in years, after his and her mother’s messy divorce when she was six, after Leonard fucked off to Boston when she was twelve to get his book published and ended up staying, Leonard almost didn’t believe that he was looking at his daughter and not at a time traveling version of his younger ex wife. If Joanna’s voice was a little deeper, a little more Georgian, and if she wore her hair down instead of always braiding it down her back, it really would have been creepy. 

“Hey, sweet pea.” He pulled her forward to plant a kiss on her forehead. He would have hugged her except he wasn’t positive of the last time he’d showered. 

She waited patiently while he went back upstairs to shower and put on clothes that looked decently clean and unwrinkled. When Leonard came back to the foyer fully dressed, her raincoat was hung up on the coat rack and her boots were off, and he finally found her in the kitchen. 

“You don’t have to do that,” he said, because he felt like he needed to say that every Sunday when Joanna inevitably started cleaning the house for him. She was in the fridge this time, sniffing out expired food. “Stop doing that.”

“You’re going to poison yourself.”

“I don’t  _ eat _ the expired food, Jo. I just keep it in the fridge to grow mold.”

“Ha ha.” She poured his milk out into the sink before throwing the carton away and then closed the fridge, apparently satisfied. Either that or she was hungry enough to give up for now. 

“Remind me to get milk on my way home,” Leonard said while they were on the T. Usually they would just eat somewhere in Somerville near his house, but this morning Joanna had insisted on taking him downtown to some new brunch restaurant all her classmates were talking about. Downtown Boston had really lost the charm it used to have when he first moved. Now it just reminded him of his job. 

Almost two years ago, he’d missed his deadline for his second book for the fourth time, and as much as the royalties from a New York Times bestseller were keeping him comfortable, his hope for finishing the book and starting on a third and becoming an actual novelist had completely run out. He became an adjunct writing professor for one of the many pretentious private colleges in Boston just to feel productive about something. 

Fast forward to now and he’d bumped it up to four colleges where he had two or three workshops each. He was practically a full time professor at this point, only moonlighting as a writer in the evenings and on his days off. Four days a week he surrounded himself with bright-eyed twenty year olds and lied to their faces making it seem like being a writer wasn’t a sad, pathetic life where you might get lucky enough to make one good thing once and then spend the rest of your days trying to chase whatever it was that compelled you to make it. They looked at him like he was some sort of genius. He didn’t have the heart to tell them that he was a fraud, though, mostly because he knew how much they were paying just to sit in the classroom with him. Speaking of students, 

“How’s your semester going,” he asked Joanna, pulling her attention away from staring at the blur of underground Boston outside the train windows. 

“It’s good, I guess.”

“You guess?”

Their conversation continued to be a little rough like that until Leonard got some caffeine into his body, and then he started waking up, and Joanna started her typical interrogation into his life. Lucky for her, she was the one person who Leonard tolerated being interrogated by.

“Why are you teaching so many workshops this semester, anyway? You’re supposed to be finishing your book.”

“I was  _ supposed _ to finish my book three years ago.”

Leonard finished off his coffee and wished they had just gone to the diner next to his house where the waitress seemed to have an extra sense for detecting empty coffee mugs. Instead they were at some boutique place with a French name where if he wanted more coffee he’d have to  _ buy _ a refill. Both the coffee and the food were better, here, of course, but it was the damn principle of the thing. 

“Is it about money?”

“Yes it’s about money.”

“You were on the bestseller list for four years, Dad, doesn’t that make you, like, set for life.”

“Royalties aren’t what you think they are.” Leonard stared down at his empty mug. Maybe he would just pay for the refill, after all. It would at least give him an excuse to stand up and take a walk and hope that his daughter would have a new conversation topic when he came back. “Everyone’s already got a copy of my book who wants one.”

“Hm.” Joanna rested her chin on her hands and seemed to be studying him. He didn’t like it.

“I’m getting more coffee.”

When he came back it almost looked like Joanna was ready to talk about something other than her father’s sad literary career. He was half right, at least. She waited for him to pour milk into his coffee and take at least a few sips of it before she said, 

“Why don’t you rent out one of your rooms?”

“Now why would I do that.”

“For the money. You could work a little less and focus on writing.”

Leonard sighed. 

“And because I don’t like the idea of you living in that big old house all by yourself. It’s sad, Dad. It really is.”

She had a point about that. When Leonard had bought the old brownstone he’d imagined a different life for himself in it, one that usually included more visitors than just his daughter once a week. Four years in that house and he still hadn’t finished painting the walls like he’d wanted to, there were at least a few unopened moving boxes tucked away in closets where he wouldn’t have to look at them, and he’d somehow managed to become the neighborhood weirdo. His neighbors mostly avoided him, of course, but when they did happen to run into each other while taking out the trash or checking the mail it always happened to be when Leonard was wearing pjs and a bathrobe and usually no shoes, or when he was coming home at the end of the day with takeout in one hand and a value pack of toilet paper in the other. Once he’d found himself staring out the window for a nondescript length of time on one of his more blocked days and didn’t realize he was staring straight into the open window of his neighbor’s bedroom. He had to move his writing desk into a different room after that. 

“Why don’t you move in with me?”

“And commute from Somerville every morning?”

Another good point. 

“That wouldn’t stop you from working so much, anyway,” Joanna continued, “Because I wouldn’t pay rent. You need someone to rent the room.”

Plus, and he knew she wasn’t going to bring this up, Jocelyn would probably refuse to let Joanna move in with him. He was a bad influence, according to her divorce lawyer who’d denied him joint custody, and it would interfere with Joanna having a normal college student life, and all that bullshit. Leonard already knew what her arguments would be in that conversation. It was an impossible suggestion to begin with, but if Leonard was going to have a goddamn  _ roommate _ at thirty nine years old he might as well try to have it be the one person he wouldn’t hate living with. 

“Well I would need to make one of the rooms actually worth renting.” Leonard crossed his arms over his chest. “And buy furniture for it and put up a coat of paint and all that crap. Did you consider the money I’ll have to  _ spend _ to even start this money-making plan of yours?”

Joanna grinned when she realized that it had meant she’d convinced him. 

 

-

 

A week and a half later, after two afternoons spent clearing dust and moving furniture, one spent painting the walls of what had been Leonard’s writing room, and one soul sucking trip to IKEA, Leonard put out an ad for the room in every Boston flatsharing group he could find. After sorting through the responses which were almost all scams or bots, and deciding that it would be too weird to rent to a college student, he was left with three prospective tenants. 

One of them, a lawyer in her mid 30s who wore shiny white heels that were completely undamaged by their walk from the T stop in the pouring rain, took one look at the first floor of the house and told Leonard plainly that she wasn’t interested in even seeing the bedroom. 

Leonard tried his best to clean up before the second one, a fifty year old professor at Suffolk, but on the morning they were supposed to meet he texted Leonard to say that he’d just agreed to a different room. So it was down to one, unless he wanted to repost the ads and start the whole thing all over again. 

A week later Leonard went to find whoever it was at the T stop, some guy named Jim Kirk whose Facebook account didn’t even have a profile picture. Leonard felt like a moron having to ask what the guy looked like, but Jim had given him a vague description and it at least gave him something to do while he waited. He scanned the people walking by looking for a man who was six feet tall with blond hair and blue eyes, and it only took a few minutes before he wondered if he was being catfished. 

This Jim guy really hadn’t told him very much about himself at all, Leonard realized. Only that he was interested in having a roommate because he worked at the airport and his weird hours made it difficult to keep an apartment. Leonard didn’t know if he really wanted to be living with someone who wasn’t capable of living on their own, but he was desperate, and he had been rejected twice, and if he didn’t find somebody to take the room already he was going to give up on the whole idea and then Joanna would be disappointed in him. 

“Hey, Leonard McCoy?”

Leonard jumped. 

“Sorry, I didn’t mean to sneak up on you.”

He hadn’t snuck up on him, in fact Leonard had just been standing there spaced out thinking about why someone would be motivated to catfish him over a room for rent advertisement. 

“It’s Jim. Jim Kirk.”

It was indeed. His vague description of himself had been right: six feet tall, blond hair, blue eyes. He had left out thick, dark eyebrows and a self-satisfied expression and it probably would have helped to know what he was wearing today, blue jeans and a black leather jacket. Leonard was already rewriting their entire conversation in his head. 

“Sounds like you already remember my name,” he said, trying not to be in a bad mood already. They shook hands and Leonard led them to the house without any more pleasantries. 

“So how long have you lived in this house?”

“Four years.”

“And you’re just now looking for a roommate?”

“Yep.”

Jim looked sideways at him while they walked. Leonard could tell that he was waiting for him to ask questions in exchange, but he really didn’t feel like it. He didn’t want to get attached to the idea of having found a tenant before the man had seen the house and the room and agreed to take it. 

“Sorry for the mess,” Leonard mumbled as he put the key in the lock. It was actually cleaner than it had been in months; he just wanted Jim to think that this was considered messy. 

“I like it already and I’ve only seen the outside.” Jim stood way too close to him while he waited for Leonard to get the door open. Somehow with an audience it was taking ten times longer than necessary. “The red brick. Looks like Beacon Hill.”

“This whole state is covered in red brick houses. Beacon Hill ain’t special.”

“If you say so.”

Jim followed him inside. Joanna had helped spruce up the downstairs that past weekend, most importantly by pulling the blinds and unpacking all of Leonard’s books that had been sitting in boxes so that they finally filled the shelves in the living room. She put a throw pillow on the old leather couch and a book on the coffee table and suddenly it was like somebody actually used that room. Leonard stood awkwardly in the foyer while Jim poked around the living room and then the kitchen. 

“There’s also a guest bath and a coat closet on this floor. Laundry’s downstairs.”

“There’s a downstairs?”

“It’s not what you think. Just a creepy room to keep the washer in.”

Jim nodded, opening the door to the coat closet and then the bathroom. 

“What’s upstairs?”

“My room, the open room, the study, and another bathroom.”

“ _ The _ study? So is that a common space?” 

“What would an airport employee need a home office for.” Leonard said flatly, and mentally kicked himself because he’d just insulted this guys job and they hadn’t even been upstairs yet. Jim didn’t look offended, though. He was the one that had been so damn cryptic about himself, anyway. 

“I’m a pilot, actually.”

So he was a pilot. Leonard didn’t know what that type of job was actually like, only that airplane crew members usually worked a few days on and a few days off. Maybe that was why he didn’t want to have to take care of his own place. 

“Which airline?” He asked, attempting to save this conversation so that they could go upstairs.

“Jetblue.”

Leonard let out a low whistle. So he was a  _ fancy  _ pilot. Jim just smirked at him in response, like he knew he was hot shit.

How the hell this guy ended up in Leonard’s house, he really had no clue. He looked like a goddamn Levi’s model, and yet didn’t even brag about it over the internet like any other man would, and on top of that he was a pilot for one of the most luxurious airlines in the United States. Leonard didn’t even fly Jetblue when he went on his book tour. Jim Kirk seemed like the type of person he could have gone his entire life without running into even by chance. 

“So can I go upstairs?” Jim asked. Leonard nodded and gestured for him to lead the way. They climbed up the old wooden staircase and Leonard panicked a little bit when he realized he couldn’t remember if he had closed his bedroom door on his way out or if Jim was going to be able to see what a disaster it was as they walked past the master suite on their way to the other rooms. 

When they got to the top Leonard saw that the door was definitely wide open. He pushed past Jim a little too eagerly so he could go pull the door shut, and Jim just blinked at him from the stairs. 

“It’s uh…”  _ a complete fucking mess in there that I don’t want you to see before you agree to live with me? _ Leonard wasn’t going to say that. He cleared his throat. “The room you would be renting is down here.”

He led them to the spare room, which Joanna almost single handedly decorated. It had a double bed with an old-style wire frame and a side table, wardrobe, and desk all made from the same dark wood. She’d wanted to get bedding but Leonard didn’t want to make any assumptions about who would be moving in, so the room was pretty bare with just the furniture and the mattress. Joanna had managed to sell him, though, on a lamp for the bedside table. 

“Is this furniture all new?”

“Yeah, the room was empty before.”  _ And after I had to move my office out of here because I was accidentally stalking the next door neighbor.  _

“Well it’s the nicest room I’ve looked at so far.” Jim walked inside, even though the whole room was pretty much visible from the doorway. He peeked out the window and under the bed. Once it looked like he’d finished snooping he stood to face Leonard, pushing back his jacket to put his hands on his hips. 

“How much?”


	2. Chapter 2

In the first few weeks after Jim moved in Leonard was able to understand why he didn’t want to live alone. He worked for three or four days at a time, came home with nothing to do for two or three days, and then shipped out again.

It was in these days when he was home with nothing to do that Leonard also learned why he didn’t live alone, because he tried so hard to socialize with him that Leonard could only imagine what the hell he must have done to entertain himself before he had a roommate to bother. 

Jim had just come back from three days of flying and, after sleeping for fourteen hours, showed up in the doorway of Leonard’s office like some sort of apparition. Leonard really needed to remember to close that door now that he didn’t live alone. He finally noticed Jim in his peripheral vision and pointedly didn’t give him the satisfaction of looking up from his laptop.

“How long have you been standing there.”

He didn’t answer that question, but for some reason interpreted Leonard’s acknowledgement of his presence as an invitation to come inside the office.

“You’re a writer, aren’t you? I thought you were just a professor but I heard that keyboard like all night.”

“It’s an old house, the walls are thin.”

“Written anything good?”

Leonard looked up from his computer at that one, and Jim looked seriously curious, even though there was just something about his tone of voice half the time that seemed like he was always about to make some sarcastic joke. After a few seconds he decided to give Jim the benefit of the doubt.

“Yeah, once. A book.”

“Can I read it?”

Leonard leaned back in his chair, crossed his arms over his chest and studied Jim while he considered whether or not he should give him his book. He was sure he had some copies, still, in the bottom drawer of his desk. His first instinct was no, because giving your new roommate your own book to read seemed to be toeing the line a little bit on shitting where you eat, but the book was almost 600 pages. That was 600 pages of reading that Jim would be doing instead of coming into his office to bother him like this.

He leaned down and opened up the drawer. There were about a dozen copies of his book still in there, all of them autographed just in case the opportunity ever presented itself to give them to his workshop students or something. He pulled one out and Jim was already reaching his hand over the desk to take it. Leonard held it back. 

“I will let you read this  _ IF _ ,” Leonard said, trying to ignore the little glint of excitement in Jim’s eyes which told him this was definitely a mistake, “you promise to never mention it again and never attempt to give me feedback.”

“Deal. Free book.”

Leonard sighed and handed it over. Jim studied the cover, turning it over in his hands.

“You really wrote a book, huh?”

Leonard just grunted in response, because what the hell else was he supposed to say to something like that.  _ Yes _ he really wrote a book. His name was on there, wasn’t it?

“Dust and Bones.” Jim read the title out loud. It had been so long since Leonard had ever had to introduce himself as a writer or introduce the idea of his book that it really felt weird, like he was doing some sort of charade.

“Looks gritty.”

“Didn’t I say not to talk to me about it.”

“Alright, alright, I’m going.” Jim, finally, thank god, moved away from the desk and started walking out of Leonard’s office, stopping at the doorway again to say, “Thanks for the book.”

That was the last time Leonard had seen him for the rest of the week. When the house was empty and he was free to leave the doors open again, he wondered, distantly, just for a second, if Jim had read the book, and if he liked it.

 

-

 

Even though Leonard was in absolutely no place to judge, Jim Kirk was kind of a weird roommate. Mostly just because of his working hours, but when he was home, he was weird. He filled his half of the kitchen cupboards with protein powders and meal replacement shakes and health supplements, but he only seemed capable of cooking eggs, bacon, bacon and eggs, or frozen pizza. And when he wasn’t making noise in the kitchen, he was absolutely silent. 

So quiet that Leonard couldn’t be sure half the time if he was even home, and when he did appear it never failed to make Leonard jump and then feel stupid for scaring so easily and then grumble about putting a goddamn bell around Jim’s neck all while Jim just stood there smirking as if watching Leonard do all that was some sort of entertainment for him. 

Leonard really had no idea what the man did with his free time, other than sleeping, eating, and going out for long runs almost every morning. He didn’t seem to have any sort of social life, and Leonard never even heard him talking on the phone. After a certain point when he realized how much he was analyzing every moment when they were both in the house at the same time, though, Leonard started to feel like a creep. He decided he would have to just let Jim keep his mystery. He needed to get back to writing anyway. 

 

-

 

His second book had started organically, popped into his mind all of a sudden during his first book tour after  _ Dust and Bones _ made the bestseller list. He rushed back to his hotel to start writing it down and wrote 30 pages in one sitting. It had seemed to good to be true. 

Because it was. His draft was rounding 800 pages now, five years later, and he still had no idea where the fuck the story was even going, where it was supposed to end, and what the hell was wrong with him. These were the three questions that he couldn’t seem to get out of his head from the moment he woke up every morning until he finally fell asleep. Even when he left the house and paced around his classrooms listening to his students reading and critiquing each other’s work, he was really just thinking about himself. It had become one of his shitty habits, spacing out in the middle of class trying to write his own book when he should have been actually paying attention to the workshop he was supposedly teaching. 

Really, his entire life was starting to feel like a fucking charade. He didn’t even know if he could call himself a writer anymore. He almost wished he had one of those jobs that was over as soon as you get home, like Jim had. He imagined it probably felt a hell of a lot more rewarding than being a “writer”, if he even still was one. The only thing the two of them did have in common was ridiculous hours, but on Leonard’s side of that it was really his own fault.

“You’re kinda gross, you know that?” Jim said one morning after walking in on Leonard in just his robe and boxers, unshaven after four days and pouring hot water over the same tea bag for the third time that morning. He looked like he had just come back from a run, dressed in all-black workout gear and a beanie, his cheeks and nose tinted red from the cold. Leonard envied how healthy and alive he always seemed to look, even with the crazy hours he worked. 

“You really made it seem like you were normal when you first showed me the place.”

To be honest, Leonard didn’t have a response to that, save for agreeing that he was indeed gross, which he was not going to do. Jim shrugged and breezed into the kitchen, opening up his side of the pantry to decide which ridiculous over processed wheatgrass-protein-whey-shake concoction he was going to indulge in today. Leonard didn’t know how anyone could stand to drink that shit, especially mixed with just  _ water  _ like Jim made them. 

“What else am I supposed to make them with?  _ Milk _ ?” 

Leonard blinked at him, wondering how the hell Jim was reading his mind before he realized he must have said at least some of his thoughts out loud just now.  

“Have you ever tried eating your calories instead of drinking them,” Leonard asked, even though he was really in no position to be giving nutritional advice. The last thing he’d eaten was a slice of bread with peanut butter on it maybe at two in the morning, just so his empty stomach would stop keeping him awake. He hadn’t had anything since. Jim called him on it. 

“You’re really trying to give me nutritional advice?”

“I write better when I’m hungry,” Leonard griped, taking his mug and pushing past Jim so he could get out of the kitchen and out of this conversation and back to his terrible awful manuscript. 

“There’s absolutely no way that that could be true,” Jim called after him. “I don’t even believe that  _ you _ think that’s true.”

“Whatever.”

Leonard climbed the stairs back to his room. 


	3. Chapter 3

Jim poked his head into the door of Leonard’s office, which was becoming a habit of his, apparently, and just served as a reminder that Leonard really needed to remember to close that goddamn door. In his defense, he’d had no idea Jim was home today. 

“I didn’t know you were here.” Leonard didn’t look up from his computer, from the empty page he’d been staring at for the better part of an hour.

“Do you want me to put up a calendar on the fridge?”

Leonard was tempted to say yes. Knowing Jim’s work schedule would really come in handy, because then he would know when he needed to be on guard in case the guy popped up out of nowhere to bother him like he was currently doing. But he didn’t say yes, because that would make it seem like he was actually interested in Jim’s life, which he wasn’t. As long as he paid rent and cleaned up after himself he was free to do whatever he wanted, in Leonard’s eyes. It’s just that his continued attempts to socialize were really getting on his nerves. 

He didn’t end up responding, and he hoped that was enough for Jim to understand that he could be on his way now. Jim stayed in the doorway.

“Do you want something?” Leonard asked, still staring at the empty page. He typed a few words and then deleted them right after. Apparently Jim was really bad at picking up signals because as soon as Leonard had asked him that question he just walked in and sat down in the empty chair. 

“Did I say you could sit there.”

“Are you hungry?” Jim asked. He leaned back in the chair, spreading his legs across the floor in front of him, like he owned the goddamn place. Leonard realized, too late, that he had looked up from his laptop when Jim sat down and now he was giving him the satisfaction of his attention.  _ Man, fuck this guy _ , Leonard thought, and then,  _ come to think of it, am I hungry? _

Jim raised his eyebrows at him, waiting. 

“I don’t know.”

“How do you not know.”

“I’m not thinking about it.” Leonard looked back down at his hands on the keyboard, hovering over the keys and yet somehow repelled by them. He couldn’t seem to type a single full sentence today. And now Jim was in here distracting him and making it worse. He sighed and looked back at Jim, that smug bastard, sitting in  _ his _ chair  _ uninvited _ \-- “What do you care if I’m hungry?”

“Because I’m hungry. And If you’re hungry too then we should get dinner.”

Leonard had no idea what face he must have made in response to that but Jim just smirked at him, like what he said had been some sort of dare. 

“Kitchen’s downstairs.”

“I don’t want to cook.”

“There’s a diner two blocks down.”

“Great, let’s go.”

Jim hopped to his feet and walked out, and for some unholy reason Leonard found himself following him. 

“That wasn’t me trying to make plans, you know. I can’t go out, anyway. I need to write.”

Jim paused halfway down the stairs and turned to look at him over his shoulder. 

“From what I heard all afternoon--or didn’t hear, I guess--you’ve been staring at an empty page.”

Leonard still followed him downstairs but it wasn’t because he was going to get dinner with Jim he just wanted to make sure he could hear him cursing, because  _ who the fuck do you think you are you don’t know me you don’t even know what I do fuck you Jim you don’t know me _ . Jim just shrugged his leather jacket on and threw Leonard’s coat at him. It hit Leonard on the shoulder before sliding down to the floor. Leonard just stared at him in disbelief.

“Put it on,” Jim said.

“I’m not going to dinner with you.”

“You’re already down here, aren’t you?” Jim shoved his feet into his sneakers without bending over, took two steps forward and slapped his hand against Leonard’s shoulder. “We can get to know each other.”

“No thanks.”

“Come on, grumpy. Your blank page will still be there when you get back.”

Leonard didn’t know which of his demons was possessing him that night, but against his better judgement he actually put his coat on, found his shoes, and followed Jim outside. 

They went to what was probably Leonard’s favorite diner, though, so at least his bad mood wasn’t going to get any worse. He could push his writing struggles to the back of his mind for as long as it took to inhale a plate full of greasy food and throw back all of the bottomless diner coffee he wanted. Jim just walked next to him on the sidewalk with the cheekiest stupidest grin on his face after Leonard finally got on board with his plans. It reminded him of Joanna. The two of them were similar in that respect, in how they managed to get Leonard to do whatever they wanted and couldn’t help gloating over it. But he really didn’t know enough about Jim to compare him to his daughter, and he was sure that if he knew enough then it would be insulting to Joanna to do so. 

“Can I smoke in here?” Jim asked the waitress once they’d sat down in a booth. It was maybe 9 or 10 pm, and they were practically alone in the section. The waitress just shrugged. 

“I don’t give a shit.”

Jim pulled out a pack of menthols and Leonard just watched him in confusion. The more he learned about Jim the less any of it made sense as a whole. He was a pilot, and he looked like he’d just walked out of a cologne ad, and he didn’t seem to have any friends, and he didn’t seem to use the internet, and he drank half of his meals in the form of protein shakes, and his solid food diet was primarily bacon, and he went for multi-hour runs, and he smoked fucking  _ menthols _ . 

“What?” Jim asked, the skinny cigarette hanging out of his mouth as he moved to light it.

“Who  _ are _ you?”

Jim just smiled at that, and took a drag before saying,

“Why, so you can write a character after me?”

“Don’t flatter yourself.”

“Well if you ever run out of ideas, you have my full permission.”

Their waitress came back to pour dark, steaming coffee into their mugs, and Jim smiled at her, smoke curling around his face. Leonard realized, holding the menu in his hands and smelling the coffee in front of him, that he was actually fucking starving. He ordered the steak and eggs and Jim asked for a breakfast burrito without even opening the menu to check if they offered it. 

She left again, and Leonard hoped that Jim would turn off the charm and the smile when she did, but he just redirected it to him. Leonard coughed at the menthol scented smoke coming his way and hoped that Jim would get the message; he didn’t. He kept smoking his cigarette and studied Leonard as he poured a total of five of those little creamers into his coffee, not even checking which type they were.

“It tastes like jet fuel,” was all Leonard could say in his defense. Jim just nodded, not so much in agreement as in acceptance of Leonard’s disgusting coffee habits. 

“So let’s talk about your book,” Jim said. He didn’t even wait for Leonard to take a goddamn sip of his hazelnut-cream-flavored jet fuel.  

“Let’s not.”

“Don’t you wonder what I thought about it? I read it.”

Leonard drank some of his coffee. One of those creamers must have been sugar-free, too, he could taste the sickly fake sweetener in it. He’d have to look out for that for the next cup. He was waiting for Jim to give up on the topic, or at least redirect it into something that Leonard felt more equipped to handle at his current level of self esteem. 

He really, really didn’t want to know what Jim thought about his book. Maybe secretly he did, but he didn’t want to look Jim in the eyes while he told him and inhale the smoke from his goddamn Virginia Slims. 

“These aren’t Virginia Slims. They’re Camels.”

Leonard dragged a hand down his face. He really had to keep better track of which of his thoughts made it out of his mouth. After what felt like very little protest at all, he surrendered.

“Okay. Fine. Tell me what you think.”

“I’ve never read a book like that before. It was like 600 pages of non stop pain but I couldn’t put it down.”

“It’s not  _ non stop _ pain--”

“Alright, I guess you did give us some closure at the end, but I wouldn’t exactly call it a happy ending.”

Jim emptied out the little bowl of creamer packs so he could use it as an ashtray, twisting his cigarette butt against the white ceramic. Leonard didn’t know what to say. He was finding it harder than usual to talk to Jim because everything he did was so damn distracting. 

“Whatever.”

“What I really want to know is how you managed to write something like that.” Jim took a sip of his own coffee, then, which he had left black. He didn’t even flinch from the taste of it, and maybe Leonard over-creamed his coffee with artificially sweetened preservative-filled creamers but drinking the stuff black, now  _ that _ was gross. 

“I wrote it after my father died.” There was no emotion in the statement at that point, because Leonard had had to talk about his father’s death being the inspiration for his book at least a thousand times. And it was kind of obvious. The story was about a man coping with his father’s death. A kindergartener could have put two and two together on that one. 

Jim didn’t give him the usual reaction of pretend shock and forced sympathy and additional, insincere praise for the book because  _ it was just good before I knew you lost your dad but now that I know that I decided it’s actually the best book ever _ and  _ good for you buddy _ . Leonard was actually grateful for that.

“Wait.” Jim said, and he looked like he was doing mental math or something, “Hold on.”

“What.”

“So your dad died--”

“Yes.”

“--and your method of grieving was to write a book where  _ you’re _ the doctor that euthanized him? I know the doctor character is supposed to be you. I can see the similarities.”

Before Leonard could formulate a response to that--that  _ ridiculous _ oversimplification of his book-- _ his life’s work _ \--they were interrupted by the plates full of food being set down in front of them, and Leonard was so starving he ignored the unnervingly short amount of time it had been since they’d ordered this. 

After he had eaten enough that he could think about something other than food he decided it was time to put Jim in his place. 

“You don’t even know what you’re talking about, Jim. For all I know that was the first book you ever read.”

“And how do you think it would make me feel about reading, if it was?” 

Leonard couldn’t think of anything to say to that except  _ fuck you _ , which he decided against because it really would have just reflected poorly on him in the end. When he agreed to this little dinner date Jim dragged him to, it was before he knew about these sharp debate skills he apparently had. And now Leonard was starting to regret giving him the book in the first place. 

His interpretation wasn’t untrue, exactly, because Leonard did sort of channel himself into the doctor character. It was just more complicated than that.  _ You wrote yourself as the doctor who euthanized your dead father _ was such a simplified way to look at it that it made his story sound almost crude. Nobody he’d given the book to--save for maybe his ex wife Jocelyn who probably could have guessed but kept her opinions to herself, thank god--had actually made that connection. Leonard had no idea how to respond. 

Lucky for him, halfway through the giant breakfast burrito which apparently was a menu item, or at least something Jim had charmed the waitress enough for her to get for him, Jim redirected the conversation to himself for once. Leonard realized that was really the first time Jim was talking about himself, which shouldn’t have been too much of a surprise considering Leonard never asked. 

“My dad died too, you know.”

“Is that so.”

“Yeah, but when I was born. So I guess I don’t get it.”

“Don’t get what?”

“Having to grieve your father after actually knowing him. I think I just grieved the idea of having a father.”

“Your mother never remarried?”

“Oh, she did.”

“Sounds like there’s a story there,” Leonard remarked, and it should have come as no surprise that Jim interpreted that remark as Leonard asking to hear the story. To be fair, there was a part of Leonard that did, secretly, want to know more about Jim, because the few bits of information that he’d picked up on him since they moved in together just didn’t seem to fit together into a real person. Maybe Jim’s life story, which he looked ready to give, would clear things up. 

So Leonard could tell that he was about to get personal, but this time he decided he’d do nothing to stop it. 

“I mean it’s not like there was never a man in the house. Growing up at first it was my older brother, but he ran away after my stepdad moved in. So then it was just the three of us. You have any siblings?”

“Nope.”

“Only child. Interesting.”

Leonard snorted. 

“No it’s not.”

“Anyway I get why my brother ran away. I almost did, too. Or I wanted to. Maybe I was too much of a pussy.”

“I can see that.”

Jim smirked at him, like he was actually enjoying this, telling Leonard all of his childhood baggage over breakfast food at 10 pm on a weeknight. Leonard had no idea how he managed to give off the vibe that he was a good person to confide in. Maybe Jim just had absolutely no one else who he could get to listen to him. The man needed a therapist. 

“My stepdad beat the shit out of me growing up,” Jim said, and it felt abrupt, the way it seemed to change the air between them. Jim definitely needed a therapist, didn’t he. “And then I started to act out--because of course I did--and they sent me to military school.”

“You were in the military?”

Jim nodded.

“Air force. But I only did one tour. Once I found out how much I could make as a commercial pilot after that…” 

“Ah.”

“Exactly,” Jim grinned, picking up his burrito again. 

Thankfully that was the end of the serious emotional bit of that conversation, and the rest of the evening consisted of Jim talking about life in the air force and then life as a pilot. It was kind of fascinating, if Leonard was being honest. They walked back to the house together around midnight and Leonard felt like he’d learned a lot. A lot of information which would do fuck-all at helping him get some words on his empty page, but maybe it was okay to take a break once in a while. 

 

-

 

After how much they’d gotten to know each other in that night they went out to eat it only became that much harder to ignore Jim. Ever since Jim caught on to how easy it could be to get Leonard’s attention, or to get him to agree to things, he became an unstoppable force. Leonard, as much as he tried, was nowhere near the title of immovable object. 

Pretty soon Jim picked up a habit of dragging Leonard to that diner late at night. It almost started to seem like he was sitting in his room waiting for the sound of Leonard’s typing to taper off, until he knew the exact moment when Leonard hit a wall and it was the ideal time to burst through the doorway of his office unannounced. 

Leonard let it happen. One, because he was miserable and barely ever had the energy to put up a fight, and two, because it was probably good for him to go outside in the fresh air and eat some real food. At least, that was the thought that went through his head, sometimes in Joanna’s voice, on the nights when he followed Jim out of the house and down the street for late night breakfast. Sometimes they talked and sometimes they didn’t. Leonard found he didn’t really mind either scenario. 


	4. Chapter 4

It was actually pretty rare for Jim to be home on a Sunday, so when Leonard heard noises coming from outside of his room in the morning he assumed that Joanna was here. Usually he was already awake by the time she showed up. Even if he wasn’t ready, he at least was awake and sitting at his computer. He leaped out of bed and got dressed as fast as he could to make it look like he hadn’t slept through half the morning. 

He made it down to the kitchen in record time, holding his breath to avoid outright panting at how quickly he’d woken up, only to find that Joanna wasn’t here. It was Jim, just in from a run, making all kinds of noise in the kitchen, and the clock on the microwave said 8:15 am. They locked eyes. 

“You’re up early,” Jim said. 

“I thought you were my daughter.” In order to speak Leonard had had to give up on trying to quiet his breathing and now he sounded like the one who had just come in from a run, bent over at the waist and panting. Jim raised an eyebrow at him, and then went back to looking through the cupboard like he was doing before. 

“I don’t know how I feel about that.”

“I have a daughter, she’s 20,” Leonard continued. He sat down on one of the barstools pulled up to the kitchen island. “We get brunch on Sundays, she has a key. So when I heard noises down here I thought I’d slept too late.”

“Nope, it was just me. You can go back to sleep.”

After the rush of adrenaline that had given him the ability to get ready in less than five minutes, Leonard was sure that falling asleep again wasn’t possible. At least now he would be dressed when Joanna showed up, for once. 

“I’m already up.”

“You want something?”

Jim turned back to him, holding two different protein shake mixes in his hands.

“If by ‘something’ you mean one of your meal-replacement shakes, absolutely not.”

“I can make coffee.”

Leonard thought for a minute. If he agreed to let Jim make him coffee, he would also be agreeing to drink coffee with Jim, or in front of Jim while he drank his powdery protein water. He could just escape to his office, and try to write and inevitably put himself in a bad mood while he wrote and be in a bad mood when Joanna finally got to the house. Or…

“Yeah, that’d be nice.”

 

-

 

When Joanna did arrive that morning, maybe two hours later, Leonard and Jim were still in the kitchen. The whole house smelled like coffee after Jim fucked up his first attempt and had to admit he’d never used a french press before. Leonard walked him through the second and technically ended up being the one who made coffee for them but it was the thought that counted, really. 

The lock turned and the door opened and Joanna looked entirely confused when she walked in and saw two people awake and alive and using the kitchen. 

“Hey Jojo.” Leonard felt himself smiling without even needing to think about putting a smile on his face first. He leaned against the island and gestured her to come inside but she stayed glued in the entrance to the kitchen, surprise written all over her face as her eyes traveled from her father on the barstool and then to Jim on the other side of the island. 

“Hi,” she said, and Leonard assumed it was supposed to be directed at him, but she was all but staring at Jim. Jim nodded at her. 

“I’m Jim by the way.”

“Joanna,” she replied, looking a little bit awkward. 

“Your dad was just telling me about you. Marketing at BU, right?”

“Uh...yeah.” 

Leonard glanced back and forth between the two of them. Joanna was usually pretty extroverted. With new people she tended to warm right up to them. With someone like  _ Jim _ Leonard would have expected to have to tear her out of the conversation so they could leave for brunch, but instead she was standing in the entrance to the kitchen like she might have walked into the wrong house or something. 

He tried his best to intervene before Jim got the wrong impression of Joanna. 

“Jim’s a pilot, that’s why you haven’t met him yet. Usually he works the whole weekend--”

“I’m sure he’s told you already what a weird roommate I am,” Jim interrupted, smiling over at him. This was the first time he’d met Joanna so clearly he didn’t realize how odd she was acting. Leonard just held his tongue, trying to figure out how to get rid of this tension. But he didn’t have to, as it turned out. Joanna blinked at Jim for a second before her expression finally softened. 

“Oh!” She said, “You’re the roommate!”

And all of a sudden her awkwardness was gone. She started asking Jim all sorts of questions, stepping back into her pleasant, charming demeanor. Like Leonard had expected, her and Jim only bounced off of each other, and he knew that if he didn’t act fast they were going to be a party of three for brunch. 

When he finally managed to drag her out of the kitchen and out of the house so they could go eat, the question still stayed with him. They made their way to the diner, Leonard awake enough to be in step with Joanna this morning instead of two steps behind like usual, and he figured he might as well ask.

“Why were you so weird when you met Jim just now.”

“I was weird?” She replied, clearly skirting the question. 

“Yeah. Usually you’re the social one between the two of us. Is something wrong at school? Or with your roommates?”

“Everything’s fine, dad.” She smiled, but Leonard could tell she was still being evasive. “Don’t worry about me.”

“It was just out of character, is all.”

And Joanna gave him that look, that  _ I’m not one of your characters _ look that shined playfully in her eyes. Except she  _ was _ one of his characters. She was a part of every good character he’d ever written. So he tried his best not to worry about it, even though Joanna hadn’t really given him a good answer, because he trusted her, and he trusted her to tell him whatever he  _ actually _ needed to know. 

She could tell, though, that he was holding back. They stood at the curb waiting to cross the street and she crossed her arms over her chest, squeaking the material of her blue raincoat. She wouldn’t really meet his eyes when she said, 

“Okay. I was weird because I didn’t realize he was your roommate and when I walked in and saw you guys I thought you two had hooked up last night, or something.”

Leonard felt his eyes go wide. He tried to reach for some sort of response to that but he couldn’t find anything before the light at the crosswalk was green and then they were walking, Leonard’s legs involuntarily carrying him forward as he struggled to process that. He didn’t talk about his love life with Joanna, ever, which made it all the more difficult. So she had no precedent for what it would look like if Leonard  _ did _ have someone in his life, or who he was even into, or whether or not he would even be into someone like Jim Kirk--good lord. But apparently the scene in the kitchen of Leonard and Jim laughing and drinking coffee together was so out of the ordinary that it had been the best conclusion she could come to. 

And Leonard was the one accusing  _ her _ of being out of character. He realized, then, that what she had actually walked in on had been her father fully clothed and awake and in a good mood on a Sunday morning for the first time in months. She had walked in on him actually using the kitchen, actually entertaining what looked like a guest. And maybe he and Jim had gotten comfortable enough with each other at this point that to Joanna, who has never really seen Leonard willingly socialize, it could look like they were more than just roommates. 

“He’s just my roommate,” Leonard finally responded.

“I know, I know.” She finally looked him in the eyes again, and he was glad there was nothing there like relief, like potentially seeing her father involved with another man had been a cause for concern. “I’m glad you found him, anyway. He seems good for you.”

“Well now you don’t know what you’re talking about,” Leonard griped, following her into the diner and towards their usual table, “The kid won’t ever leave me alone. And he was hopeless with the french press this morning. Good for nothing, more like.”

Joanna just shook her head and settled into the booth, smiling a little bit and probably glad to have provoked her father back into his usual mood. She was right, though, all things considered. If this morning was any example, Jim  _ was _ good for him. 


	5. Chapter 5

Leonard had given his literary agent a nickname--Spock--because of his tendency to be an icy cold hardass who refused to ever cut him a break and seemed to pointedly never laugh at any of Leonard’s jokes. When he’d first called him Mr. Spock (another joke) he then responded by arguing that Vulcans in the original Star Trek canon actually experience much stronger emotions than humans and only seem emotionless because of their  _ incredible self control, something which you are apparently lacking, Leonard _ . Which only motivated Leonard to use the nickname exclusively. 

“There’s a car outside the house,” Jim said one afternoon, leaning against the doorway of Leonard’s office. By this time Leonard was just used to him showing up like this; he all but expected it to happen. He looked up from his laptop. 

“What kind of car.”

“White Volvo.”

“Jesus,” Leonard dragged a hand down his face. He peeked at his screen over his hand, at the unfinished manuscript that he was about to get yelled at for. “Fuck.”

“What? Who is it?”

“My agent.”

He was totally screwed. He’d told Spock maybe two or three months ago, over the phone after a few drinks, that his book would be done before Christmas. And then he’d blinked and it was December and he did not have a finished book. And Spock was here to collect said unfinished book, probably already on his last nerve since it wouldn’t be the first time he’d shown up expecting a manuscript only for Leonard to have nothing. And now Jim would get to witness it all. 

“You’re right,” Jim whispered to him from the porch as Spock got out of his car and made his way up the yard. “He does look like Spock from Star Trek. Except for the eyebrows.”

“I told you.”

Spock’s haircut didn’t help his case. Sure, his eyebrows were thick and definitely non-Vulcan, but his dark, shiny hair had a tendency to fall over his forehead sometimes and resemble a bowl cut. Although Leonard was about to stress him out enough that he’d be pushing his hair out of his face in frustration, and then the only resemblance he’d have to a Vulcan would be the giant stick up his ass. 

“Leonard,” Spock said by way of greeting. Leonard faked a smile at him, no teeth, and gestured him inside. Spock didn’t move from the porch steps. 

“You know why I’m here. I won’t come inside unless I know your manuscript is ready.”

Leonard tried to think of the most un-disappointing way to say that the manuscript wasn’t ready and Spock could go ahead and get in his car and drive back to New York City. It was difficult to think, though, with Spock glaring at him like that, staring him down until he finally said what Spock had no doubt been expecting. 

“It’s not, okay. You should have called before you made the trip.”

“Rejecting me over the phone wouldn’t have made you feel bad enough about it,” Spock said neatly, and out of the corner of his eye Leonard could see Jim’s eyes go wide. Jim who had just gotten used to Leonard’s bad attitude and was now witnessing the incredible combined force of the two worst attitudes in the literary world. 

Spock turned his attention to Jim, watching him over Leonard’s shoulder. 

“Who are you.”

“I’m Jim Kirk,” he replied. He smiled a bit as he tried to come off as non-threatening, “I’m Leonard’s roommate.”

“Leonard’s roommate,” Spock repeated, voice dry as if it was some sort of joke. “Tell me, Jim Kirk, does he write anymore?”

“Every day.”

“I don’t need to prove myself, you know.”

“Maybe it’s time you start trying to prove yourself, actually, before the literary world forgets your name.”

“Woah, woah, woah, okay,” Jim stepped forward and positioned himself in between the two of them, and Leonard almost expected him to actually physically push them apart. “How about we take this to a neutral location. Maybe one with alcohol.”

Spock raised an eyebrow at him. 

“Leonard’s paying.”

Leonard didn’t even have time to protest to that when Spock closed his eyes, pinching the bridge of his nose, which was as close as he tended to get to openly sighing, and said, 

“Fine.”

It really was incredible how Jim managed to convince even Spock to do things. Maybe he  _ was _ a little bit like Joanna. Not that Leonard would ever say that. He knew it’d make Jim way too pleased with himself. 

They ended up in Boston proper, which must have been Jim’s idea of a neutral location, but it just reminded Leonard of his job and no doubt reminded Spock of the time when Leonard was actually selling books and came into town for events and meet-and-greets. Jim navigated the city, under and above ground, like a local, the kind of local who doesn’t read the lights at a crosswalk and knows exactly where the doors of the train are going to open as it pulls into the station. Spock and Leonard must have been trailing behind him like two kids on their way to the principal’s office. 

“This place is probably dark and loud enough for the conversation you two need to have,” Jim said as he pulled them inside an underground pub, an Irish one, the type of place Leonard would never set foot in if he didn’t have to. 

“Are you Irish or something?” Leonard asked. 

“What’s it to you?”

“He probably is,” Spock remarked. As soon as the three of them chose a booth, far in the corner and dimly lit, Jim slipped away and mumbled something about drinks and left Leonard alone with Spock. He groaned internally, because even after putting it off for months and then, today, for as long as it took to get to this shitty pub, he was nowhere near ready to have this conversation. 

“Have you managed to learn anything from the writing courses you’re supposed to be teaching? Maybe something about finishing your work?”

“Fuck off.” Leonard slouched against the booth, hearing the leather squeak from the friction.

“I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t have to be, Leonard,” Spock said, his voice unnervingly prim and civil, “In fact, if I could, I would never speak to you again. It’s the publishing company that’s forcing my hand.”

“Why haven’t they just given up on me, at this point. You clearly have.”

“Trust me, I’ve asked this question already, to myself and to the head editor.”

Leonard sighed. 

“I’ll get it done.”

“If you’re going to lie to me again you could at least come up with one you haven’t used twenty times already.”

“I  _ will _ ,” Leonard grumbled. He actually felt genuine relief when Jim came back, managing to carry three beers in his hands. Leonard didn’t even care that Jim hadn’t asked what he wanted, or that he got him what looked like a Guinness. He was just glad to not be alone with Spock anymore, and, soon, to not be sober with Spock anymore.

“You two work it out?” Jim asked as he slid into the booth next to Leonard. Leonard almost considered asking if he would sit in between him and Spock, but that thought alone felt a little bit childish. 

“No,” Spock said, at the same time Leonard responded,

“Yes.”

Jim nodded solemnly, and held up his beer as a sort of cheers. Leonard halfheartedly clinked his own glass against Jim’s; Spock did not. They sat there in complete silence, surrounded by noise and smoke and tension, until they were all on their third beers. And then something shifted. Maybe it had something to do with Leonard getting up to go to the bathroom and coming back to find Jim sitting next to Spock, the two of them actually having a conversation. Leonard could imagine Jim starting it, scooting closer with his charm and his beer glass and asking  _ so what’s it like being a literary agent? _ or something equally innocent that a narcissistic bastard like Spock would happily respond to. 

“Most of my clients are located in New York,” Spock was explaining when Leonard was back within earshot, “So I usually don’t have to travel for work.”

“Leonard is just that special, huh?” Jim said, because he knew Leonard could hear, and looked him in the eyes as he came over to sit down. Leonard rolled his eyes but he was glad to have a buffer in between him and Spock, now. 

“That’s one way you could describe him.”

Whatever conversation they were having went a little bit stale after Leonard came back, and he could see Jim scrambling for something that could include all three of them without ruffling any feathers. 

“Look at that guy over there,” he finally said, subtly pointing to a man sitting a few booths away. “With the rugby jersey.”

“It’s for the Scottish team, I wonder why he’s in here,” Spock said thoughtfully. He was clearly just humoring Jim. 

“What do you think he does for a living,” Jim asked. 

“Something that doesn’t allow him to wear a rugby jersey during work hours.”

Leonard studied the man for a moment. The bright blue jersey was the most noticeable thing about him, and maybe in different clothes he wouldn’t be very noticeable at all. He had short brown hair, was clean shaven with almost a boyish face, and upon further inspection, had what was most definitely a joint hanging out of his mouth. 

“Something boring and technical,” Leonard finally said, voice getting a little slow now, from the alcohol. He almost wished he had a joint, too, “Like a mechanic. A small engine mechanic. He’s too short to work on big engines.”

Spock let out a little snort of laughter and both Jim and Leonard whipped their heads around in surprise. Then Jim just smiled and leaned back against the booth, pulling out his menthols from his jacket. He looked especially pleased with himself after managing to get the three of them talking. 

“He owns his own shop,” Spock added, watching rugby-jersey very thoughtfully, “But when new customers arrive they ask if his father is around.”

“Do you think he’s actually Scottish, or does he just wear that jersey to be different,” Leonard asked.

“He’s Scottish,” Spock said, “Although he comes to Irish bars specifically to stand out with how Scottish he is.”

“Alright, I’ll buy it.”

Jim watched the two of them in fascination as they bounced off of each other. He put one of his skinny cigarettes in his mouth. 

“What’s his name?” he asked. 

“Bruce,” Leonard said, “Bruce Duncan Scott.”

“You’re just stealing names from Macbeth and adding Scott at the end,” Jim teased. Leonard smirked at him over his shoulder. 

“No. Montgomery. His name is Montgomery, but it’s too serious and too long of a name for him, so people call him Scott.”

“Just Scott?”

Jim got a little twinkle in his eye, watching Montgomery Scott from across the bar.

“Scotty.”

“You’re right,” Spock said, like it was an epiphany.

“Shit.” Leonard looked over at him. “Not bad.”

Jim grinned at him. 

“Maybe he can help you finish your book,” Spock said next, and Leonard let out a long exhale, gritting his teeth together. 

“Come on, man, we finally managed to get away from that topic,” Jim groaned. 

The corner of Spock’s mouth turned up a little bit. Jim smiled at both of them and lit his cigarette, and Leonard didn’t know what possessed him to do it, maybe it was his desire to smoke weed at that moment, but he reached for the box out of Jim’s jacket pocket and took one for himself. Jim passed him his lighter and he smoked a menthol cigarette for the first time since high school, probably.

“God, fucking menthols.”

 

-

 

Spock left for New York the next morning, and Jim was leaving for work that afternoon. Leonard wanted to tell Jim thank you, for saving his ass when Spock showed up. The guy was good under pressure it turned out, and quick on his feet, which Leonard should have expected considering he was ex-air force and currently a fucking pilot. 

But he spent so long trying to decide if he wanted to say it, and how he wanted to say it, that Jim had already left for work before Leonard even made up his mind. And then he would be gone for days and probably by the time he came back Leonard would be in a bad mood again. So he didn’t say anything. 


	6. Chapter 6

“Leonard.”

“Mmph.”

“Leonard H. McCoy.”

Leonard groaned and rolled over, trying to get back into his dream and away from whoever was dumb enough to try and wake him up in the middle of the night. 

“Leonard H. McCoy, author of the bestselling novel  _ Dust and Bones _ , wake up.”

He realized it was Jim. Because who else would it be. At least it wasn’t like the last time he’d been woken up by Jim making noise which sent him careening out of bed because he forgot he didn’t live alone anymore. This time he angrily tried to sink deeper into bed. 

“Go away.”

“Bones. That’s a good nickname. I might call you that if you don’t wake up.”

That was enough to make Leonard turn back over again, towards the direction of Jim, so he could open his eyes and glare at him. 

“What on god's green earth is your problem.”

Jim was kneeling next to Leonard’s bed, wearing what must have been his airline uniform; it was the first time Leonard had actually seen it. He looked tired and wired all at once, and Leonard almost felt a little bit sympathetic for how demanding his job had to be that he ended up coming home in the middle of the night with that look on his face. 

“Did you just get home from work?”

Jim nodded. 

“What do you want.”

“I have a question about your book.”

“Oh,  _ god _ ,” Leonard moaned, and against his better judgement, he sat up in bed. Apparently in doing so he had accidentally signalled to Jim that he could join him, and Jim got up from the floor to sit at the foot of his bed too, cross legged, probably creasing his fancy Jetblue pilot slacks. Leonard wanted to ask if he had a hat to go with the outfit, but it seemed like a bad time. Jim chewed at his lip nervously. 

“So what, ask me your question, I’m awake.”

“Why did you write it?”

“I already told you, my dad--”

“No, I mean,” Jim’s brow furrowed, like he was having trouble finding the right words, “Why did you feel like writing the book was the best thing to do. To cope.”

“Oh.” Leonard realized he had never actually gotten that question before. People usually tended to freeze up and back away once the topic of death came up, probably out of fear that they’d offend Leonard or something. He didn’t know if he had a good answer. 

“Why did you write yourself as the doctor, I’m not--I’m not saying it’s fucked up or anything I just--I wanna know.”

“Nobody ever asked me that before.”

Jim gave Leonard time to think about it, sitting patiently at the foot of his bed. The moonlight shining through the windows was enough for Leonard to be able to see him, the clean lines of his uniform, the conflicting emotions present on his face, the bags under his eyes, his lower lip swollen from how he kept biting it. 

“I guess…” Leonard dragged a hand through his hair. He wondered which one of them looked worse, between Jim being strung out and neurotic on one side of the bed and himself on the other side, in just his boxer shorts, unshaven and probably unshowered. “I guess because...my dad always wanted me to go into medicine when I was younger. I think it disappointed him that I didn’t.”

Jim nodded, listening closely. 

“And then when he got sick, we took him to every specialist we could find, and nobody knew what to do. It felt like god was laughing at me, because I didn’t become a doctor, and then my dad had to die because nobody knew how to treat him. Like I thought...maybe if I  _ had _ become a doctor, I could have figured it out. And he wouldn’t have died.”

“You know that’s not true, right,” Jim said softly. Leonard sighed. 

“Yeah, I know. But that’s why I started the book. It was supposed to be really heroic, you know. The doctor was going to save the day in the end. But then I got to that point, and I realized...it wasn’t going to bring him back. I guess it helped me more to write myself as a doctor and still have him die, than to write some fantasy where I saved a fictional version of him.”

Jim didn’t say anything, he just watched him from the other end of the bed, but there was something in his face, like he understood everything Leonard had just said. And maybe it was just because Leonard had never actually said this to anyone before, but he didn’t know if he’d ever felt understood in the way he did right now, in the middle of the night with the moon shining through the windows and Jim still in his pilot uniform. 

“So why couldn’t this wait until the morning?”

Jim breathed out in a little bit of a laugh, looking down at his crossed ankles. He played with the hem of one pant leg. 

“I don’t know, I just felt like I had to ask you, before I forgot about it.”

“Are you feeling alright?” Leonard asked, and the question surprised him as much as it surprised Jim, who looked up from his lap. 

“I don’t know,” he said again. He must have sensed Leonard getting a little bit concerned for him, or seen it, somewhere, in his facial expression. He added, “This happens sometimes, you know. I can’t always explain it. But some flights--I just come home and I feel weird. Before I moved in here I just didn’t have anyone I could talk to about it.”

“So what was it about this flight,” Leonard asked, “if this is one that you can explain.”

Jim looked at him, and then past him, above his shoulder where the light through the blinds made stripes on the wall. He smiled a little bit. 

“A baby was born.”

“On the flight?”

“Yeah.” Jim looked back at him. 

“That happens?”

“Sometimes. It never happened to me before. It was LAX to Boston Logan and a woman had her baby in the air. She gave birth at 35 thousand feet.”

“That’s crazy.”

“Yeah.”

“Was there a doctor on the plane?”

“Not an OBGYN or anything, but an army doctor, yeah.”

“No wonder you feel weird about it,” Leonard remarked. 

“Well, not just that,” Jim said, “I was born in a car.”

“Really.”

There was just something in Jim’s face that hadn’t left, even when he had smiled or laughed during their conversation. At first Leonard thought it could be fear, like all of the coincidences that had happened on just one flight had creeped him out. But now he wondered if it wasn’t something more like awe for how the world worked sometimes. It might even be a good look for him, with his light colored eyes blown wide. 

“Where was your father?”

Jim pressed his mouth into a flat line for a second. 

“In the driver’s seat.”

“Oh.”

So Jim wasn’t born in a car, he was born in a car accident, specifically. All of a sudden Leonard started to understand what was going through his head about all of this, maybe the same way Jim had understood him a few minutes ago. It must have been entirely new for him, to have that type of connection with someone. It had to be entirely new otherwise it wouldn’t have made sense the way it completely floored him. 

“And I don’t know why, but I just…” Jim laughed, shook his head at how ridiculous it must have felt to him, “I was flying the plane and there was a woman having a baby and I felt like--I don’t know, I wondered--is this how he felt, driving my mom to the hospital that day?”

“How did you feel?”

“Terrified,” Jim said neatly, “Like I was responsible for the baby’s life. And maybe the mother’s. Which is dumb, because I just had to fly the plane. I didn’t have anything to do with what was going on inside of it.”

“I think I know how you feel,” Leonard said. 

“I know you do. I figured you would. That’s why I woke you up.”

Leonard watched him, and finally he figured that going back to sleep was a lost cause. Even if Jim left to go to his own room, this conversation was going to keep him up the rest of the night anyway. He reached over to switch on the lamp at his bedside table. Jim smiled when the light turned on, like he had just gotten his way. 

“Well,” Leonard rubbed his eyes, “I’m awake, now, after all of that. Do you want to make breakfast or something.”

Jim smiled even bigger. 

 

-

 

The two of them probably made no sense in the kitchen together. Jim still had his uniform on, although he took off his jacket and tie at least, so he just had the slacks and his blue button-up with the patches on the shoulders. Leonard, meanwhile, had just thrown his bathrobe on over his boxers and rifled through his dresser for a pair of socks. They ended up in the kitchen at three in the morning looking like the laziest people at a costume party. 

Jim was pulling out his usual eggs and bacon from the fridge, when Leonard remembered something. 

“I have a waffle maker,” he said, like an epiphany, and the look on Jim’s face was incredible.

“Holy shit. Get it.”

Leonard felt himself smiling as he got down on his knees and looked through the back of the cupboard for the waffle maker which he had never once used after he bought it. He didn’t even think Joanna knew about it, otherwise she would have stolen it from him by now. 

“Are you gonna be as bad with a waffle maker as you were with the french press?” Leonard asked when he stood back up, machine in hand. Jim took it from him and held it almost reverently. 

“Probably,” he said. 

So Leonard did most of the work, when it came to the waffles. Jim did the rest. It was four in the goddamn morning, and Leonard didn’t have to be in class until ten, so they went ahead and made the whole nine yards. Waffles, and bacon, and eggs, and coffee (which Jim managed on the first try this time). They found maple syrup in the back of the pantry and by 5 am the entire island in the kitchen was covered with what could have been the most beautiful spread Leonard had ever seen. He almost wanted to take a picture. 

They sat at the island on barstools and somehow managed to eat it all. And then it was 6 am and they were still there, on the second pot of coffee, talking about whatever they could come up with in their underslept and over caffeinated brains. Finally Leonard just went for it. 

“Do you have a hat?”

“What do you mean?”

“With your pilot outfit,” Leonard clarified, “is there a matching hat.”

Jim looked him over, eyes sweeping across Leonard’s own stylish outfit. 

“Wouldn’t you like to know.”

“As a matter of fact I would.”

And then it was 6:30 am, and they were sitting on the living room couch which neither of them ever used, eating cold, leftover waffles and laughing about god knows what, and Leonard was wearing Jim’s pilot hat. 


	7. Chapter 7

Leonard was outside for once--for once, because the weather was finally getting bearable again, which usually wasn’t enough motivation, except that it was the exact end-of-winter-beginning-of-spring weather that he was trying to describe in his book. So he was standing barefoot on the porch with a notebook and pen trying to figure out what word he was looking for. His classes had been cancelled halfway through getting dressed, leaving him in a sweatshirt and jeans and uncombed hair. He blew a lock of hair up from his forehead and scribbled down some notes. 

_ Damp. But just a little bit damp. Misty, maybe. No, not that. There’s no water in the air, really. Just a little bit of wind. The wind carries the chill all the way from the cape but it leaves you feeling warm afterwards. The wind blows and it’s winter. The wind settles and it’s spring. God this fucking sucks. I’m a fucking bad writer. I suck so bad.  _

He was having a little too much fun insulting himself, because it apparently felt a lot more rewarding when he was writing  _ I suck _ on paper with a felt-tip pen than angrily typing it into a word document, and didn’t notice Jim and Joanna walking side by side up the street until they’d already made it to the driveway. 

“ _ Damn it _ .” Leonard heard, and recognized it right away, because it was in Joanna’s voice and, more specifically, Joanna’s voice when she was mimicking her father. It had started off as just a joke and inadvertently made its way into her daily vernacular. “This was supposed to be a surprise.”

Leonard looked up from his notebook. He raised his eyebrows at Joanna, even as she shrugged off the disappointment and beamed at him from the sidewalk. 

“A surprise?”

“Yes. It  _ would _ have been.”

She looked over at Jim as if he had something to do with it and Jim rolled his eyes. They were both carrying paper bags full of groceries, it looked like. It was only then that Leonard realized he had no clue whatsoever how the two of them ended up coming home at the same time. 

“Don’t look at me,” Jim muttered, but Leonard could still hear it, “how was I supposed to know that he was going to go outside for once.”

Leonard ignored that in favor of walking out to meet Joanna at the porch steps, wrapping an arm around her and leaning closer to kiss her forehead. 

“Hi pumpkin,” he said, glancing over Joanna’s head at Jim just in time to catch him mouthing, sarcastically, the word  _ pumpkin _ . 

“I missed the last two Sundays because I went home for break so I thought we could get dinner tonight. But then I ran into Jim at the T stop and he said that making dinner would be more fun.”

“Did he, now.” Leonard raised an eyebrow at him. 

“He did.”

Joanna broke out of the hug and hoisted the paper grocery bag up onto her hip. 

“We’re making Bolognese,” Jim chimed in, and Leonard looked at both of their smiling faces and their big grocery bags and didn’t even have it in him to protest.

 

-

 

Somewhere between chopping carrots and onions and celery, and having a full-out discussion on eating in the living room vs. at the kitchen island, and watching Joanna seamlessly recruit Jim into clearing out the fridge, Leonard realized how weird it was that the three of them  _ worked _ . Weird and good, at the same time. 

His suspicions were right all along, and Jim and Joanna were pretty much cut from the same cloth. They had only met once before this, that one morning back in November when she showed up for brunch and found the two of them in the kitchen, and already it was like they spoke to each other with a thousand inside jokes between the two of them. For the first time in a few months Leonard wondered again how the hell someone like Jim Kirk had showed up in his life. 

The question stayed in his mind for the rest of the day, watching the two of them come up with ways to distract themselves until the Bolognese sauce reached three hours of cooking time, sitting on the living room floor around the coffee table while they barely managed to eat in between lines of dialogue in their conversation. Hours later when Leonard finally called Joanna an Uber to go back to campus, and she almost had more difficulty pulling herself away from Jim than she did her own father. She was still laughing as she finally stepped into the car and Jim and Leonard waved at her from the front porch and Leonard looked over at Jim, in the dim light coming from the windows, and wondered again where this man even came from. 


	8. Chapter 8

“Is it finished?”

“Almost.”

“Does this ‘almost’ carry any more weight than the last one?”

Leonard lifted his head from his laptop screen so he could give Spock a flat look. 

“Do you really think that what you’re doing is helping me.”

Apparently that was all it took to get Spock to shut up about it. Leonard watched in satisfaction as his shoulders slumped just the tiniest bit and he picked up his coffee in one hand and his e-reader in the other. He didn’t consider himself totally safe until Spock got that look on his face, the one that showed he was fully immersed in his reading, when his big eyebrows drew together just a little and his eyes narrowed and his lips parted slightly. Leonard had memorized what every facial expression of his meant after years of watching him read, and especially during those first years of watching him read his  _ own _ work. 

Oddly enough, Spock hadn’t come to Boston to demand his book, or to kill him, or even to annoy him, although he succeeded on that last one without even trying. He was in Boston for a new client of his and called Leonard to say he was in town, near one of his campuses. The fact that he called was almost as surprising as the fact that Leonard agreed to meet with him. 

They ended up at some bougie-ass coffee shop where the vanilla latte Leonard bought was so expensive that he decided he was going to stay and use their wifi one hour for every dollar spent, out of sheer principle. So they sat at one of the two-small tables with their knees bumping together while Spock read on his sleek little e-reader and Leonard typed away on his laptop and occasionally texted Jim under the table. 

Jim had the day off, and was doing god knows what back at the house. He had been out on one of his runs in the morning when Leonard was getting ready for work. Leonard thought about straight up inviting him to come downtown and hang out but instead just texted that  _ Spock dragged me to the most insufferable pretentious coffee shop in downtown Boston and I intend to squeeze every penny out of the $6 coffee I just bought. who the fuck even IS george howell. _ and figured Jim would go ahead and invite himself. 

_ You know, coffee would be cheaper if you were capable of drinking it without milk and sugar _ , was what Jim texted back. And then it might have been about an hour more, of Leonard writing and drinking his latte painfully slow and Spock at the other end of the table and in another world entirely, before Jim was suddenly standing at their little table with a coffee mug already in his hand. 

“I didn’t see you come in,” Leonard said. Jim smiled at him. He had that leather jacket on that he always wore back when it was just barely autumn and they were first getting to know each other. The exact same outfit as that first day at the T stop, actually. Leonard realized that this Jim, the one that he knew, the one that he lived with and cooked breakfast with and left his office door open for, was the same Jim he’d met those months ago. It felt crazy to think about. He wondered if there was any way he could successfully write down that feeling. 

“I know you didn’t see me. The two of you were in a trance the whole time I was in line.”

Spock blinked a few times, apparently starting to pick up on the conversation happening, and looked up from his reading.

“Oh. Hello Jim.”

“Hey Spock.” Jim turned his ten-point smile on Spock, and it got just that much wider when he saw the small little cringe in response to Leonard’s nickname for him. 

“You could call me by my real name, you know. Both of you could.”

“I think at this point it’s too late for me to learn another name for you,” Jim said, and Leonard liked him so much in that moment that he scooted his chair over to make room for him at the tiny table without his even needing to ask. Jim charmed an extra chair away from the group next to them and sat down. 

“I hope you brought something to do.” Leonard gave Jim a once-over and saw that he hadn’t brought a backpack or anything. Which meant he was bound to end up sitting there looking bored, as soon as he stopped looking smug from the fact that Leonard had very clearly given him a once-over.

“I did.” Jim reached into his jacket and pulled out a small paperback. “Thought it’d be very on-brand if I came to read with you guys.”

“Is that mine.”

“Yes.”

“What book is it?” Spock asked, and the following conversation lasted long enough that Leonard eventually just tuned it out. He went back to writing with the sound of Jim and Spock discussing _ The Bean Trees _ in the background, paying just enough attention so that he could butt in if necessary. 

He got to the point where he really did believe that his book was almost finished. By the time the coffee shop was near close and the other patrons started packing up and filing out, Leonard’s brain was almost entirely empty, in a good way. The way that meant he wrote all that he could and wasn’t going to be up half the night thinking it over. Maybe it was the location that made things different. It had been a long time since he’d properly sat down somewhere outside of his house to write. He wondered why he ever stopped. His hands were shaking a little bit as he packed up his laptop, thinking about the fact that his book really could be done soon. He didn’t know the end, exactly, but he felt it. 

It was the strangest thing, but the three of them ended up walking to the train together, and actually talking to each other. Leonard was sure that the reason for the change between him and Spock had to be Jim. Nothing and no one else had ever been able to get the two of them to play nice with each other. All it took, apparently, was Jim. He forced them to go out drinking together, and in the same way that he’d somehow effortlessly carved a space for himself in Leonard’s life, he apparently did in Spock’s as well, and in record time; they’d only met twice at this point. 

They parted ways so Jim and Leonard could get on the red line back to Somerville. 

“He’s kinda cool,” Jim said while they waited for the train, hands stuffed in his pockets. 

“He hates that nickname, you know.”

“Well he’s not cool enough that I’m going to stop calling him that. I need to make sure you still know I’m on your side.”

“There are sides?”

“Yep.” Jim started walking towards the end of the station when they could hear the train approaching, looking for the exact spot where the doors would open. “And I’m on yours.”

Leonard followed him. 

He realized, too, on the train home, that it had probably been years since he’d felt so good about his life. And even then he didn’t have all that he did now. He had Joanna again, after twelve years, and he had written a bestseller, and he had bought a house. He still had all those things, and now he had a second book which was almost done, and an improving relationship with his literary agent, and Jim. He wasn’t sure what category Jim fell under, exactly.  _ Friend _ didn’t seem like enough. _ Roommate _ was laughably reductive. He decided he’d have to think about that. 

 

-

 

It was only right, then, that everything would go to shit. As soon as he dared to think that he might be happy. 

Somerville wasn’t always crowded like downtown Boston. That was one of the reasons that Leonard liked it. He always forgot, though, that the emptiness could sometimes feel creepy, because usually he didn’t stay out so late. 

If it was any other night and Leonard wasn’t riding the high of a productive afternoon, his mind occupied with the thought that on his laptop, in his backpack that hung over one shoulder, was his almost-finished book. He didn’t even act annoyed when Jim stopped him just outside of the station so he could smoke a cigarette before they got to the house. He just stood there, watching Jim smoke his menthols, and almost looking through him, his mind still consumed with the words he’d written that day. He didn’t realize he had completely spaced out doing that until Jim was staring at him, wide eyed. The first words out of his mouth hadn’t registered, and he had to repeat them. 

“Give him your backpack,” is what Jim said. Leonard just stared back at him in confusion. And then he realized there was something pressed into his back, there was the distinct feeling of an unknown presence behind him. 

“I...what.”

“Give him. Your backpack.” Jim was emptying his own pockets while he spoke, looking calm and collected everywhere except for his eyes. The hand that wasn’t pressed into his back reached forward and took Jim’s phone and wallet from him. Jim took his watch off, too, without even being prompted. 

“Leonard,” he said next, voice unraveling just slightly from the cool, neat, this-is-your-captain-speaking voice he was just using a second before. 

“Listen to your boyfriend,” said the voice behind him, mocking. It was in that moment that Leonard realized what was actually happening. That the thing pressed into his back was a gun. 

“But my--”

Jim’s eyes widened even more, somehow, and his eyebrows knit together almost like he was angry, and he just kept shaking his head no. The barrel of the gun pressed harder into Leonard’s back and it nearly shoved him forward, until the strap of his backpack slipped down his shoulder and finally Leonard took it off and threw it behind him. 

“Wallet, too,” Jim said, “And your phone. We didn’t see anything.”

 

-

 

_ We didn’t see anything _ were the words that stuck in Leonard’s head, for some reason. Jim definitely saw all of it. He saw whoever came up behind Leonard and shoved a gun against his back. He’d had to watch as Leonard took so long to realize what was happening that he probably risked them getting killed. If the roles were reversed, if Jim was the one caught unaware and Leonard was the one locking eyes with whoever had pulled a gun on him, they really could have died like that. Over two wallets and two phones and a five-year-old Macbook Pro. 

The funny thing was that the one document on Leonard’s computer, the 800+ page draft of his novel, was more valuable to him than any of his other things. And he lost it, just like that, without even putting up a fight. He almost started to envy the version of himself in an alternate universe that had been shot outside of the train station in the dark on a Thursday night, that forced whoever it was to steal his laptop out of his cold, dead, pathetic hands. 

For how cool he’d been under pressure, when Leonard was seconds away from getting his kidney blown out, Jim was shaking as they walked back to the house, alternating between chewing at his thumbnail and at his bottom lip. 

“You have copies, don’t you? You have a hard drive, right? Writers do that. They keep stuff on hard drives.”

Leonard didn’t even consider the fact that Jim was freaking out not because someone had just pointed a gun at them ten minutes ago, but because of his stupid manuscript, of all things. 

“I have a hard drive.”

“Good.”

“With an alternate version of the first chapter.”

Jim didn’t even look over at him. He just stared straight ahead, crossed his arms over his chest and chewed on his thumbnail again, and kept walking. 

Leonard didn’t break down until he was home, sitting on the couch in the living room that they now apparently used, and he realized that going upstairs meant instinctively walking into his office to put his laptop on his desk and remembering that he doesn’t have his laptop anymore. Or his book. Or his reason to live, while we’re at it. 

Even so, his ‘breaking down’ wasn’t like Jim’s neurotic nail-biting which had turned into neurotic kitchen organizing and then neurotic cooking. It looked a little more like Leonard sitting on the couch, not even bothering to slouch back into the cushions, and staring past the windows on the living room wall and past the street outside and past the atlantic ocean and all the way to the edge of his mortality, probably. 

He didn’t know how long he’d been sitting like that until Jim was nudging at his shoulder. 

“Eat something.”

So he ate. 

Jim sat down next to him on the couch, silently, and waited for Leonard to finish eating and to start talking. Somehow that was exactly how the rest of the night went. 


	9. Chapter 9

Leonard didn’t know how he managed to fall asleep after all that. He woke up, sunlight streaming through the windows and painting stripes across the couch, and thought about how he didn’t own a computer anymore, and didn’t have a manuscript to work on, and he really didn’t have any reason at all to get up. It wasn’t as depressing of a thought as he expected. He realized that his fear last night, of going upstairs, might have been a little dramatic. 

But Jim probably wouldn’t have let him go up there anyway. He had been insistent on the two of them staying on the couch until Leonard had done enough emotional processing to make sure that the morning wouldn’t shock him all over again. 

Leonard thought about Jim. 

To be honest, he probably wouldn’t have made it through the night without him. If he had been alone when it happened, if he’d had to go home alone, to his empty house, and cope with his feelings all by himself, he probably wouldn’t have managed. If Spock had been the other one there, it probably would’ve been worse. 

Instead, there was Jim. Jim leading him home. Jim pacing around the kitchen insisting that he eat something while Leonard just sat in complete shock. Jim sitting next to him on the couch in the living room until the sun almost started to come up while Leonard was struck with grief, until he finally managed to put words to his feelings and ended up talking in circles trying to process everything. He’d probably repeated himself a hundred times over in the process but Jim was still nodding, still engaging his every crazed thought, still, occasionally, trying to say something helpful, even though Leonard kept shutting him down the first few times. 

He realized that life had sort of given him a second chance, this morning, when he woke up on his living room couch and realized that Jim was still there. Their legs were pressed together on the couch even as Jim had slept leaned into the cushions at an angle that couldn’t have been comfortable, his neck propped up against the back of the couch and his mouth hanging open. He was snoring, too. Leonard didn’t know if he had ever felt so glad to see him. 

He shook Jim awake, until one loud inhale cut short and Jim’s head snapped up and he opened his eyes. He looked over at Leonard with what started off as a glare, and then his face softened, and he seemed sleepy and almost happy. 

“Good morning.”

“Jim,” Leonard started. 

“Bones,” Jim said back, mocking the serious tone of Leonard’s voice.

“I just wanted to say thank you. For last night. And for everything.”

“For everything,” Jim repeated. He rubbed his eyes and sat up a little bit. “I don’t think I know what that means.”

Leonard shrugged.

“I just wanted to say it.”

“Does it mean you’ll get out the waffle maker for me again?”

Leonard looked at Jim for a moment, really looked at him, bathed in sunlight, wearing the same jeans and wrinkled t shirt from the night before, hair messy and eyelids still heavy and a little bit of drool at the corner of his mouth. He knew for a fact that he would do anything for this man, and all Jim was asking for was waffles for breakfast. 

“Yeah, we can do that.”

 

-

 

Leonard and Jim really didn’t go into each other’s rooms at all, except for that one time when Jim woke Leonard up in the middle of the night, but things had started feeling different between them lately, anyway. And maybe having had a gun pointed at you made things feel different even faster. Leonard figured to hell with the rest of the rules of decorum he’d subconsciously adopted when he decided to have a roommate. 

So Leonard was sitting on Jim’s bed, next to an open suitcase, and watching him pack. It came as no surprise, but Jim really loved having an audience. He felt the need to ask Leonard’s opinion on every item that went into his suitcase (as if it mattered; he was probably just going to sleep through all of his free hours this weekend, anyway). 

“When do you leave today?”

Jim turned from his dresser to face Leonard, a pair of jeans in each hand. 

“Dark wash,” Leonard said. Jim nodded and threw the pair towards his suitcase, almost hitting Leonard’s arm instead. He turned back to his dresser and finally answered, 

“Do you want me to put a calendar on the fridge?”

“Do you  _ want _ to put a calendar on the fridge?”

“I will if  _ you _ want me to.”

“Were you always this annoying?”

Jim looked over his shoulder, tilted his head to the side and smirked a little bit. Leonard was sure he used to feel bothered by that look on Jim’s face. He was sure it used to bother him. And then Jim winked. 

“Maybe.”

Leonard rolled his eyes. 

“You still didn’t answer my question.”

“Why do you need to know? Are you planning a party as soon as I leave, or something?” Jim carried over what looked like the last of his clothes for the weekend. It had to be the last of it. The pile on top of his suitcase already seemed like it wasn’t going to possibly all fit inside. Still, Jim stood in front of the bed and went to work, methodically packing it all inside with the ease of practice. Leonard thought about how often he had to do this. Multiple times a week, at least, and probably every morning during the days when he was out. He hadn’t actually considered what it must be like to travel constantly. No wonder Jim didn’t seem to do anything when he was home; he was probably exhausted all the time. 

“Or are you experiencing separation anxiety? I didn’t peg you for the clingy type, but I guess we kind of almost died together last night.”

Leonard didn’t answer right away. He was distracted by the sight of Jim folding and rolling his clothes with inhuman efficiency, fitting everything inside his suitcase like tetris pieces. And he was also a little bit distracted by the accusation that he was  _ clingy _ . 

“I’m not accusing you of anything.”

“I’m not clingy.”

“Of course you’re not.”

Jim zipped up his suitcase and moved it to the floor so he could sit on the edge of the bed, about a foot away from Leonard. It felt incredibly far and incredibly close all at once. 

“I need to catch the train in thirty minutes.”

“Oh.”

“But I’ll be back Sunday night, at like two in the morning, probably.”

Leonard nodded, and glanced over at Jim to see that he had that smug look on his face again. 

“Aww, you  _ are _ gonna miss me, aren’t you.”

“Shut up.” Leonard pushed up off of Jim’s bed to prove a point, and left the room to the sound of Jim’s laughter. He got into the hallway and realized that he still didn’t have a computer, or a phone, or anything to do at all, really, except talk to Jim, and stifled a sigh before heading downstairs to the kitchen. 

He was eating toast and waiting for his coffee to brew when Jim finally came down with his suitcase, still just wearing jeans and a t shirt. 

“Where’s your uniform?”

“I’ll get it from the dry cleaner’s on the way and change at the airport.”

Half on instinct and half because of...something else-- _ was it separation anxiety? _ \--Leonard followed Jim out onto the front porch. Jim, who was headed off to be a pilot  _ right now _ , even though he didn’t at all look the part. He was too casual, and too relaxed, and Leonard  _ knew _ he hadn’t slept enough, and here he was about to go fly an airplane full of people from one city to another. He found himself wondering, again, about what Jim’s life must be like. He was sure that he had never cared so much about all of the things he didn’t know about Jim, until today. 

Jim must have been able to sense that Leonard’s head was full of questions, or full of something. He took Leonard’s coffee cup out of his hand and took a sip, grinning when all of Leonard’s weird pensiveness was immediately replaced by an irritated sigh. 

“Give me that.”

“It’s just a few days, Bones. I won’t be gone for long.”

Leonard scoffed again at the nickname, and Jim just kept smiling, light shining in his eyes, and handed him his coffee back.

“Why are you so sure I’m gonna miss you,” Leonard asked, giving him a flat look over his coffee mug. 

Jim tilted his head to the side. 

“Why are you so sure you won’t?” 

“You know, every word out of your mouth is lowering your chances of being missed.”

“So there’s a chance?”

Jim looked way too pleased with himself at how well he was pushing Leonard’s buttons right now, standing on the front porch in the warmth of the afternoon. Leonard thanked god that he finally picked up his suitcase and made his way down the driveway, flashing his final shit-eating grin before he went to the T stop and then to the airport and then up into the stratosphere. 

He didn’t realize, until Jim turned to look over his shoulder halfway down the block to wave goodbye, that he had been waiting for Jim to turn around and wave goodbye. 

So that was something for Leonard to think about for the next three days, while he had no phone, and no computer, and no dignity. 


	10. Chapter 10

He got another phone the next day, and it crossed his mind while he was uploading all of his contacts that maybe he should call Jim. He was about to, when he remembered that Jim had given over his phone Thursday night, too, and maybe he did get a new one already, but Leonard didn’t know the number, and for a second he was about to try and figure out how he could locate Jim through the airline and call him in his hotel room, or something, before he realized how weird he was being. Clingy. He was actually being clingy. Jim had been right, jesus christ. 

Instead Leonard just downloaded the Facebook messenger app and wrote Jim a single text saying what his new number was, and hovered his finger over the send button before he decided for certain that this wasn’t a clingy thing to do. They were roommates, after all. It made sense to have each other’s contact information. 

A few hours later Jim sent back one of those stupid GIFs that Facebook messenger lets you send to people, of some random kid at a computer nodding and giving a thumbs up to the camera, and Leonard had no idea why he’d felt so compelled to call the moron earlier that day. 

 

-

 

Leonard was busy for most of the weekend with getting  new phone, freezing all of his debit cards and ordering new ones, and shopping for a new computer. Computer shopping happened Sunday afternoon, after brunch, because Leonard knew that Joanna would be into that kind of thing. And maybe her enthusiasm would help him to have a slightly less terrible time choosing his next misery machine on which he would have to write his next miserable novel. 

It was warm enough in Boston now that Leonard hadn’t seen Joanna’s signature raincoat for weeks, and she almost seemed incomplete without it. She still had her long, blonde braid in her hair, though, and a floral sundress, and the glow of youth and beauty and intelligence that was making everyone in the Best Buy turn their heads while they browsed the computer aisles. 

“Are you sure you don’t want a desktop?” She asked, looking admiringly at the new iMac. 

“Why would I want a desktop.”

“Don’t you usually just write from home?”

“I mean…”

“Plus a desktop is harder to steal,” she added, her voice just a few degrees gentler. 

She had reacted pretty well when Leonard told her what happened. A little more sympathetic and emotional than Leonard would have liked, because the worry in her eyes put him on edge, but she didn’t cause a scene or anything while they were at brunch, so he was grateful. And, as expected, she perked up when Leonard told her he wanted her to come with him to get a new computer. 

“I’m not getting the iMac.”

“It doesn’t have to be an iMac, but you could think about getting a desktop.”

“I want the  _ option _ of writing outside the house, Jo, even if I don’t ever use it.”

“Alright, fine.” Joanna held up her hands in surrender, but he could see that there was nothing but amusement in her facial expression, and they went to find the laptops. 

 

-

 

“So when’s Jim gonna be home again for us to make dinner?” Joanna asked casually. while they stood at the checkout counter waiting to see if the clerk could get them a student discount. Leonard turned to look over at her and she laughed at what must have been a pretty incredulous look on his face. 

“What? It was fun, the last time.”

Leonard stared at her for a few seconds longer, waiting for her to reveal that she’d been joking. She didn’t. 

“He’s coming home tonight,” he finally said, “But I don’t know when he’s shipping out again.”

Apparently the combined power of Leonard’s thousand yard stare and Joanna’s irresistible earnestness was enough to convince the clerk to give them a discount using Joanna’s student ID, and they left the store with Leonard’s new laptop. 

“Are you still pretending you don’t like Jim?”

“What are you talking about.”

“I know you like him.”

“Good lord, girly,” Leonard muttered, but he really didn’t have a good argument. He forgot sometimes how smart his daughter was, how easily she read people. It was one of the things that made her so charming, that she always seemed to know what was on people’s minds. 

She gave him a somewhat mischievous grin at his inability to argue, and Leonard had no choice but to sigh, and accept that Jim had made it so far into his personal life to win the approval of his daughter. He walked Joanna to the train back to school and tried not to feel too strongly about the fact that Jim had managed to win her approval, because that meant that Joanna would ensure that Jim was sticking around, maybe for good, and maybe Leonard didn’t mind that thought at all.

 

-

 

Leonard was staring at a blank page--a new blank page, on his new laptop--when his phone rang and he almost let out a sigh of relief at having an excuse to stop trying to write for a few minutes. 

“What.”

“Is that how you answer the phone? Is that how your parents taught you to answer the phone?”

“What do you want, Jim.”

“This is a new number. You didn’t even know it was me, Bones, and you’re not allowed to use that as your excuse.”

“Do you want to hang up and try again and see what I say the next time?”

He heard Jim let out a little huff of laughter on the other side of the call, and could imagine what his face probably looked like. Self-satisfied and amused and too damn eager to be on the phone with someone like Leonard. 

“That’s tempting, but I think I’ll just stay on the line and let you continue to charm me.”

Leonard scoffed and Jim just laughed again, clearer this time, and his face was clearer in Leonard’s mind, too. He may as well have been sitting in that armchair on the other side of Leonard’s desk, grinning and taking up space and somehow, at the end of it, convincing Leonard to join him for dinner. 

“So why did you call? Or is that too optimistic of me, to assume there was a reason.”

“I just wanted you to have my new number, too. And I have three hours to kill in Atlanta. And I figured you were over there angrily trying to write and maybe you needed a break.”

“I don’t need a break,” Leonard sighed, “I haven’t written shit all afternoon.”

“You know they put a little note next to your book in the stores here, since you’re from Georgia. Some of them even have a picture of you. I saw one place that had a special table for famous authors from Georgia and you were the centerpiece.”

“Good lord.”

“If only those salespeople knew I was now on the phone talking to the author himself.”

“Or that you _ live _ with the author himself.”

“Oh shit, even more bragging rights.”

“Yeah I’m certain, Jim, that they would not give a single fuck if you tried to go over there and brag about the fact that you’ve seen me in my house clothes.”

“Well they should. Or they would, if they knew what you looked like in your house clothes.”

Leonard had to think about Jim’s last words, for a second. He leaned back in his chair, away from his computer, and looked down at his lap, at his  _ house clothes _ . Only boxer shorts, really. Jim was probably in full uniform, probably sitting in some Jetblue lounge in Atlanta International, with three hours to kill, smiling into a phone call with his depressed and washed up roommate who he was going to see again tomorrow, anyway. 

“Jesus, did you really just call me on the phone to flirt.”

“Not explicitly, but I don’t mind that this is where we ended up.”

“Wow.”

Another few seconds passed of Leonard having to use whatever function was left in his three remaining brain cells just to process that Jim was actually openly flirting with him, and figure out what he wanted to do about that. Apparently, the answer was not that he wanted to hang up the phone. He stayed on the line until Jim asked,

“Do you miss me?”

There were a lot of things Leonard could have said to that, and a good percentage of them probably would have been better than what he actually said. Well, maybe not better, but more responsible, at least. 

“Now’s not really the time to ask that, seeing as I’m in my final hours of quiet before you get back.”

“So you’re saying the answer would be different now than if I had asked you yesterday.”

_ Fuck.  _

Leonard dragged a hand through his hair. He really had no idea why he’d said something suggestive like that and at this point wasn’t even sure if the words had even existed in his brain as thoughts long enough for him to stop them before they just came out his mouth. 

“Did you miss me yesterday?”

“Why do you care so much if I miss you?” Leonard asked, before hastily adding, “ _ If. _ ”

Jim laughed, and he sounded bright and relaxed and unafraid of the question, apparently, or maybe just unafraid of anything at all. 

“I just want to know how stupid I am for thinking about you while I’ve been away.”

“You’re not thinking about me while you’re flying the plane, I hope. Because that would be stupid.”

“Ha ha.”

“This wasn’t something that could wait until you get home?”

“You wanted me to wake you up at two in the morning to ask if you missed me while I was gone? I feel like that would be a great way to ensure that you never miss me again.”

“It wouldn’t be the first time you woke me up in the middle of the night so you could say something cryptic in your pilot uniform.”

“You like the uniform, don’t you. You keep bringing it up.”

Leonard felt his face heat up and resisted the urge to just hang up the phone before he said anything else. Maybe they could pretend this conversation never happened. But then he thought about Jim coming home, and knowing that Leonard might feel something for him, and pretending that he didn’t know, and he didn’t like that at all. So he stayed on the phone, still, even though he felt too hot and his chair felt too small and Jim was definitely enjoying himself way too much. 

“Jesus christ, Jim.”

“I know that was kind of suggestive but don’t worry, we’re not going to have phone sex while I’m sitting at an airport Schlotzsky’s.”

“That’s real considerate of you.”

“I try my best.”

It was quiet on the line for a minute, and Leonard was grateful, almost, because it helped him to calm down a little bit and to stop blushing like a teenage girl. And then Jim made everything worse with his stupid voice and his earnestness and his uniform which he was definitely wearing and which he definitely knew, now, that Leonard liked to see him wearing. 

“What else do you think about me?” He asked. 

“What do you mean.”

“Consider it a writing exercise, Bones. Almost a year ago we went to that shitty diner for the first time and you asked me who the hell I was and now I want to know what you learned. And what you think.”

“This is just a ploy to try to get me to write you into my novel, isn’t it.”

“Maybe,” Jim said, and Leonard could hear his goddamn smile through the goddamn phone. 

“Okay, fine.” He huffed a little bit, “I guess, you’re very persuasive. Exhibit A being the fact that I’m even indulging in this conversation topic which was clearly just designed to stroke your damn oversized  _ ego _ \--”

“Oh, do go on, you know I love when you sweet talk me like that--”

“--and how you managed to get me to hang out with you enough that we actually made it to this point.”

“What point is that?”

“Fuck if I know, Jim.”

Jim laughed. 

“Fair enough. Keep going.”

“You are so self-centered.”

“I know, and I want to hear more.”

“That counted as more,” Leonard said. He leaned forward to close his laptop, maybe to discourage himself from writing anything down and giving Jim the satisfaction of this having qualified as a writing exercise. 

“And?”

“And--I don’t fucking know. You’re just a walking contradiction. Everything you do confuses me and for some reason I still haven’t given up on trying to understand you. I’ve spent too much time already trying to figure you out and it’s not even because I want to write something about you. It’s just because I want to know.”

“At this point you have got to know all that there is to know about me.”

“I do, Jim, and that’s the worst part because I still don’t get you. Maybe I never will.”

“Well,” Jim took a breath, “You don’t need to  _ get _ me to  _ have _ me, you know.”

“God, that was corny.”

“Not bad though, right? You can use that if you write a romance novel for your next one.”

“Absolutely not.”

Leonard realized he was smiling, almost laughing. It was unbelievable, really. But that was Jim. A bunch of unbelievable contradictory things wrapped up in an unusually attractive package which sometimes wore a pilot uniform. 

“What will you write next, do you think?”

Leonard sighed, feeling relieved and weighed down all at once. 

“I really don’t know. I’ve been thinking about it all day.”

“You still have a version of the first chapter on your hard drive, right? Do you want to give that another try?”

“No, I don’t think so.”

“Good.”

Leonard snorted, wrinkled his nose a little bit. 

“Good? What do you mean  _ good _ , Jim,” he asked-- _ demanded _ , almost. 

“That book you were writing was like a prison cell for you. And you built it yourself, if we continue with this metaphor. You trapped yourself inside of it and you looked miserable in there.”

“It’s a good thing I’m the one who’s a writer because that simile was even worse than your pickup line a few minutes ago.”

“Well you know what I mean, don’t you?”

“Yeah...I guess I do.”

“I think if you’re going to give the doctor another story it needs to be one that doesn’t turn out so painful for you to write. Because then, like, imagine how painful it’s gonna be for us to read.”

“I don’t think you really know what you’re talking about.”

“Maybe I don’t,” Jim conceded, “But I know you.”

“Oh do you, now,” Leonard asked. 

“Yeah, I do. I know you.”

And Leonard really couldn’t argue with that, and he didn’t want to, because the words felt too nice to hear for him to try to disprove them. They stayed on the phone, bickering, and even when they finished bickering, when Leonard went back to his laptop and Jim started walking through the airport to his next flight, casually telling Leonard his observations on the people and places that he walked by. It was almost upsetting to have to hang up, except that he remembered Jim was going to be back in the house in just a few hours. 

It took every ounce of self control he had not to watch the clock during those few hours. 

 

-

 

That being said, Leonard was asleep by the time Jim finally did come home. But he was asleep on the couch, where he’d intended to wait up, so it was the thought that counted. Jim didn’t seem to mind. He was smiling wide from where he knelt on the floor in front of the couch, nudging Leonard awake with a hand on his knee. 

“You waited up for me,” he said. Leonard blinked and stretched and rubbed his eyes. 

“I tried to. I forgot that landing in Boston at 2 am didn’t mean arriving home at 2am.”

“Yeah, it does not mean that. But 3:45 am seemed like a lot to ask.”

“You’re damn right.”

Jim stayed on the floor, for some reason, his hand curling around Leonard’s leg, above his calf and behind the knee. He looked tired but there was something bright and divine in his eyes. He smiled again, smaller this time, and a little bit suggestive. 

“I stayed in uniform for you.”

“I see that.”

“Even though I’ve had this on since my 6 am flight from LAX to DFW and I feel gross.”

Leonard breathed out a laugh, and Jim leaned his tired head forward a little bit and rested his cheek against Leonard’s knee. It didn’t seem right that he was still on his knees, but he looked comfortable, and he held tight to Leonard’s leg. But Leonard still felt like this was too far away, after everything that had happened between them this afternoon. 

That phone call felt like a lifetime ago, almost. 

He sat up from the couch cushions, out of the slouch that he’d fallen asleep in, and reached down to fit his hand against the back of Jim’s neck. He wasn’t sure if it was right, and he wasn’t sure how long it’d been since he’d done anything like this, or felt anything like this, and then Jim looked up at him, with all of the life and the love in his eyes, and everything was right. It had to be, for Jim to be looking at him like that. 

“You can take it off of me, if you want.”

“Can I?”

“Yeah.”

And then Jim let go of him, and slowly lifted himself up, moving from the floor to the couch in one fluid motion. He settled over Leonard’s lap, knees pressing into the couch cushions on either side of him. Leonard brought his hand back to Jim’s neck, slipping under the collar of his baby-blue uniform shirt, pulled him forward just a little bit more, and kissed him. 

He might as well have been asleep up until that exact second when their lips met. When Jim, tired and heavy over Leonard’s lap, opened up for him like he was coming back to life, like Leonard’s mouth contained the very air he needed to breathe. He brought his hands to either side of Leonard’s face, his palms, surprisingly soft, spreading out over the rough stubble that covered Leonard’s cheeks and jaw and neck, and kept their faces impossibly close. They pressed their mouths together again and again, like they were testing out every angle, and it was all good, every touch of Jim’s mouth to his own were good, and then something clicked the next time Leonard kissed him, and kissing was  _ unbelievable _ . 

Leonard lost himself in it, in the warmth and the softness and the earnest movement of Jim’s mouth, his tongue, his hands that held Leonard’s face between them like it was something valuable. He pulled away for a moment, because he had to, just to say,

“Where on Earth did you come from?”

Jim grinned, their faces so close that Leonard could have felt it as well as seen it. 

“Riverside, Iowa.”

“Sounds like the middle of nowhere.”

“It is.”

And Jim closed the distance between them again. Leonard still wondered, distantly, how the hell Jim had ended up in his life, in his spare room, in his thoughts, in his conversations with his daughter, in his  _ lap _ \--but none of it seemed important enough to break the kiss again. Another few minutes of exploring each other’s mouths, of discovering what made Jim gasp, what made him pant, what made him moan low and breathless in the back of his throat, and then Jim took hold of Leonard’s hands, brought them gently and purposefully to the collar of his shirt, to the knot of his tie. Leonard got the message, remembered Jim’s words from before,  _ you can take it off of me, if you want. _

Every piece of his perfect uniform that Leonard took off was like unwrapping a present. Jim just watched him do it, balanced over Leonard’s lap, arms hanging loosely at his sides to move however Leonard needed them to. Leonard loosened his tie, first, pulled it out from under Jim’s shirt collar and let it fall to the floor. He unbuttoned the first few buttons of Jim’s shirt before he realized he was getting ahead of himself, and pushed the blazer off of his shoulders. 

“It’s not too late for me to go get the hat.”

Leonard snorted, his eyes focused on Jim’s chest as he smoothed his hands across the fabric of his shirt, before coming back to the buttons. 

“We can save that for next time.”

He looked up just in time to see the warmth in Jim’s expression, the smile tugging at the corners of his mouth and crinkling the skin around his eyes, at the words  _ next time _ . 

The uniform shirt came off next, and then Jim was wearing only a white undershirt and slacks and things somehow felt more intimate. Jim crossed his arms over his stomach and pulled his undershirt off himself, baring his chest to Leonard and maybe showing off a little, and Leonard pulled him back for another kiss after that. The slacks could wait, considering Jim would have to get up for Leonard to take them off. 

Jim was on board with the change in plans, apparently, and pushed Leonard back against the couch. He was so preoccupied with just the act of kissing that Leonard didn’t notice how Jim continued to maneuver him, until his back was against the cushions and his head was against the armrest and Jim was over him on his knees and elbows. 

“Is this what you imagined when you were waiting for me to come home?”

“I don’t know,” Leonard said, his mind feeling hazy already from all of the touching. It was probably the most he’d been touched by anyone since he moved out to Somerville and became a part-time professor and full-time shut-in. “I don’t remember what I was thinking about.”

“You weren’t sitting here writing out our grand romance in your head?”

“You are so set on me writing you into one of my stories, aren’t you.”

“Of course I am, why do you think I’m keeping you around.”

“Technically I’m your landlord, so it’s me who’s keeping  _ you _ around.”

Jim laughed, leaning down to mouth along Leonard’s neck, kissing a line all the way to the hem of his t shirt. 

“I love it when you threaten to evict me. It really turns me on.”

Jim’s mouth found Leonard’s again, covering up the almost-laugh that Leonard made at that, and they kissed for a while longer. Bit by bit they went further. Leonard managed to multitask long enough to get Jim’s belt off, but not his slacks, before Jim pushed his t shirt up to his collarbone and mapped out the lines of his chest, first with his hands and then with his mouth. 

“You know what else turns me on,” Jim mused, in between presses of his lips to Leonard’s sternum. 

“What,” Leonard breathed. He really should have expected Jim to be so damn talkative at a time like this. He’d gotten more than enough proof that Jim was talkative at every opportunity. He had no idea why it came as a surprise. 

“Seeing you walk around here half naked all the time.”

Leonard lifted his head off of the armrest to look down at Jim. 

“I really doubt that you find that attractive instead of sad and frumpy.”

Jim smiled, resting his chin against Leonard’s chest. 

“I mean, when I first moved in here I thought you were a mess, but now I also think you’re hot.”

“Wow, you’re really skilled at dirty talk, aren’t you.”

“Do you want me to talk dirty? I can talk dirty.” Jim moved back up so he was face to face with Leonard, chest to chest, and suddenly Leonard couldn’t help but notice how hard he was now that Jim’s own erection was pressed against his own. He almost gasped from the sensation, the pressure, the almost-friction. Jim came closer, like he was going to kiss Leonard again, and Leonard leaned into it just a fraction, only for Jim to tilt his head to the side, bringing his mouth down to Leonard’s ear. 

“Do you want me to tell you how I spent the entire trip from the airport trying not to get hard in the back of the Uber, thinking about all of the things I wanted to do to you as soon as I got home?”

Leonard gasped a little, his breath caught in the back of his throat, at how quickly their teasing and joking had changed direction to actual dirty talk. 

“I wish I wasn’t so tired. I could do all of them, until the sun came up.”

“ _ This _ is tired?”

Jim breathed out a laugh, low and close to his ear, and Leonard nearly shivered. 

“I wanna fuck you. Do you want that? I wanna see you spread out on the bed for me and grasping at the sheets and I wanna hear you scream my name and beg me to go harder. And then I wanna fuck you harder until you can’t even say anything anymore.”

“God,” was all Leonard said--all he  _ could  _ say, really--and even then it came out tight and strained. He was sure Jim was satisfied with himself, grinning down at Leonard’s neck at how easily he’d just turned him on. 

“Do you want that, Bones? Do you want to feel my cock inside of you? Or maybe you want to fuck me. We could do that too. I could ride you until you see stars.”

And here Leonard was the one who was supposedly good with words. He had absolutely nothing to say, except maybe  _ yes I want all of that hurry up and take your damn pants off _ but he knew he wouldn’t have lasted long enough for them to get any further than this, than rutting against each other, half-dressed, while Jim listed off in perfect detail every single sex fantasy he’d had that day, and maybe even before then. 

Leonard found use of his hands and managed to get them in between their stomachs and down to the zipper of Jim’s slacks, while Jim just kept narrating his own pornography in Leonard’s ear. 

“I can’t even tell you how many different ways I’ve thought about making you come this weekend while I was on my own. I think I disgraced every one of my hotel rooms, just from imagining what it would have been like if I had you in my bed.”

“Why didn’t--” Leonard struggled to finish even one sentence, especially once he had moved Jim’s pants and underwear aside and was holding Jim’s cock in his hand, finally, feeling the weight and the size and the want that Jim had, for this, for  _ him _ . “Why didn’t you--call me.”

“Why do you think I finally called you this afternoon? I knew if I spent one more night here without having you like this I was going to lose my fucking mind.”

Jim didn’t seem thrown off course at all by Leonard’s hand around his cock, he didn’t even miss a beat with his response, and Leonard was set on fixing that. Jim had to lift up a little bit on his elbows so Leonard could find the right angle, and he knew right away when he did, when he saw the color rising in Jim’s cheeks and watched his eyelids flutter shut and his mouth fall open and when Jim finally, finally shut up. 

From that point forward there was no more talking, no more fantasies or witty banter spilling out of Jim. There was only the sound of their breathing and clothes being hastily pushed aside, but not removed, because neither of them could really bear to separate. Leonard came almost as soon as he felt their cocks pressed together, wrapped in Jim’s hand, before they’d even tried to find some sort of rhythm, and then he focused all of his energy on making Jim come before the aftermath of his orgasm put him to sleep. The sound that Jim made as he came, the harsh breaths pressed into Leonard’s neck that turned to moans at the end, the way his hands grasped desperately against sweat-slick skin, Leonard knew that they were going to have to do this again, immediately, as soon as they both slept for at least a few hours. 

“I really am going to do all of those things that I mentioned,” Jim mumbled, heavy and sleepy against Leonard’s chest. “I mean it. We’re doing them. As soon as I get eight or more hours of sleep and one or more cups of coffee and maybe a protein shake.”

“I’m not making out with you if you taste like a protein shake.”

“That might be a dealbreaker, Bones.”

“It absolutely is. It’s me or the shakes, Jim.”

Jim laughed against Leonard’s chest, and it came out loose and happy and Leonard just wanted to hear that laugh again. He wanted all of this to happen again. Again and again and again. He wanted Jim to keep calling him by that stupid nickname he ripped from his book title. He wanted Jim to come home from days spent flying and come straight to Leonard’s bed, to his arms, wanted to hear all the weird cryptic post-flight thoughts Jim had on nights like that. He wanted Jim making noise in the kitchen, walking Joanna home from the T stop, asking Leonard’s opinion on which shirt he should pack for the weekend. He wanted--god, he would even let Jim read his drafts, if he asked. That thought alone was enough to send Leonard spiraling into panic, over how far he’d already fallen. 

But then he took a deep breath, and looked over at Jim, already asleep against his chest, the two of them haphazardly and somehow comfortably piled on this couch that they never used to even sit on before, swathed in the almost-light at five in the morning. It was hard to spiral, when he saw all of that. 

He’d had thoughts all weekend about whether losing the manuscript put him in a position of having a clean slate. And maybe it did, in a way. He had no choice but to forget everything he’d written in his second book and try again. But now he was thinking that he didn’t really want to clear the slate, not completely. He wanted everything else that had happened in the past year to stay where it was. He wanted Jim in his life, any way he could be. He wanted Joanna coming over to find Leonard awake and happy for a change. He wanted Spock coming to visit him without the two of them fighting the whole time. 

Leonard would throw out whatever his book had been, throw the whole thing out and start from scratch, but the rest of it he wanted to keep.

“What was it about, anyway? The second book,” Jim asked when they woke up, as if Leonard’s thoughts about it had seeped into his dreams during the night. Now it was almost noon, and sunlight poured into the living room and highlighted the mess they’d made, of wrinkled clothes and bare skin and hair that stood up in all directions. There wasn’t one thing about that mess in the living room that Leonard didn’t like. 

“Hell if I know,” Leonard said, “It was supposed to be a continuation of the first one but I don’t think I ever figured out where it was going.”

Jim pushed himself up a little, paused to yawn, and then crossed his arms over Leonard’s chest so he could prop his chin up on his wrists. His energy seemed to come back to him steadily, with every breath and blink of his eyes. 

“It doesn’t have to be a series, you know. You could just write a completely different book. Leave the doctor out of it, he’s had a hard enough life as it is.”

Leonard almost laughed, but then he realized that maybe Jim had a point.

“I don’t want you to let this get to your head, Jim, but that might be the smartest thing you’ve said about all of this.”

Jim smiled all the way to his eyes and leaned his head to the side over his crossed arms, looking up at Leonard like this was the only place in the world he wanted to be. And that seemed like a big deal, coming from someone who got free airfare whenever he wanted. Leonard studied him for a second. He looked at Jim’s face, at his dark circles, his messy hair, the stubble growing in now that he didn’t have to be a clean-shaven pilot for a few days. The striking blue of his eyes and the width of his smile. At once he felt tempted to kiss him and tempted to ask, again, where the hell he came from. Instead he just asked,

“Do you want to make breakfast?”

 

-

 

Leonard’s second book,  _ Something Blue _ , about a man who gets a second chance to form a bond with his adult daughter more than a decade after a messy divorce, took him under a year to write. It sold almost as well as  _ Dust and Bones _ . The kindest review of his book was from the Boston Globe, and went on about how, with  _ Something Blue _ , Leonard McCoy had “successfully stepped out of the shadow of his first book and into the light”. He read it for the first time because Jim had cut it out and put it on the fridge, next to the calendar that he kept updated with his work schedule. Leonard left it up there for months, and then he framed it. 

 

_ end. _


End file.
